DEATH AND DELIVERANCE [066-142-066-4.9]

By: ROBERT MASON LEE

Category: Fiction Suspense

Synopsis:

In late October 1991 a Hercules transport plane crashed  while on a
re-supply mission to Alert, on Elsmere Island Northwest Territories
Canada.  Though the weather had been clear, a condition which effected
the pilot's judgements and in a sense caused the crash, soon after the
accident conditions deteriorated rapidly.  The passengers and crew who
survived the impact soon faced blizzard conditions without adequate
clothing or shelter.  In this highly suspenseful book Lee not only
describes the perils faced by the survivors, but the forces sent to the
rescue.  Terain around the crash location and weather caused the
abandonment of some rescue efforts though the Sartechs were nearly
within hailing distance of the victims.  Of those who survived the
crash, some lived to be rescued, some did not.  The book contains some
discussion of how the actions of the victims after the crash influenced
the likelyhood of their survival.

Last printing: 09/27/02
`?08/' ISBN: 0-6454-107-6435-1
In memory of those who did not return to tell the tale

Captain John Couch

Captain Judy TrEpanier

Master Warrant Officer Tom jardine

Warrant Officer Robert Grimsley

Master Corporal Roland Pitre

Died in the service of their country October 30-31, 1991

Acknowledgments

This account would not have been possible without the help of the
Canadian Forces.  Many of the people I interviewed are mentioned in the
text and appendix.  The motivations of those who cooperated were
refreshing.  I was never pressured, directly or indirectly, to give the
book a particular slant; those who helped simply expressed the desire
that this incredible story be told with vigour and fullness.  I hope
this rendition is their reward.

I'm grateful to the many survivors, who shared their stories with me.
These stories were painful, and I recall more than once interviewing
through tears.  I hope I have treated them with respect.

The commander of the Canadian Forces Air Transport Group,
Brigadier-General Gordon Diamond, provided his own knowledge and opened
many doors.  His staff, notably executive assistant Captain Jamie van
Gelder, made arrangements swiftly and efficiently.

I was given much valuable assistance of a specialized nature.  Pilot
instructors gave me generous hours of flight time on the ce-130 Hercules
simulator in Trenton, Ontario, to experience firsthand many of the
manoeuvres described in this book.  In Edmonton, I was provided a course
in the night vision trainer at the Canadian Forces School of Aeromedical
Training, and with instructors at the Canadian Forces Survival Training
School.  I had the use of Canadian Forces library material and
aeromedical research, primarily dealing with visual illusion in flight.
I was given aircraft operating instructions, search and rescue manuals,
mission logs, and officer training texts.  Staff at all these
institutions were open and helpful, and their support is gratefully
acknowledged.  Any factual errors are the result of my own carelessness.

I was pretty much given the run of Canadian Forces bases in Edmonton,
Trenton, and Greenwood, Nova Scotia .

Arrangements were also made for me at bases in Kingston and Ottawa.
Thanks are due to the base commanders and their personnel.  I was most
demanding of CFB Edmonton commander Colonel Mike Wansink and his
executive assistant, Captain Norm Bonikowsky.  Their contributions are
greatly appreciated.

Staff at the Search and Rescue Headquarters in Trenton opened their
files and their memories to me.  Thanks are due to Master Warrant
Officer Pete Howard and Master Warrant Officer Roy Jackson.  The files
were also opened at the Edmonton Rescue Coordination Centre, whose
principals are mentioned in the text.

Individual squadrons should be singled out for providing assistance.  In
Greenwood, these were 413 Squadron, 405 Squadron, and 415 Squadron; in
Trenton, 424 Squadron, 436 Squadron, and 429 Squadron; and in Edmonton,
435 Squadron and 408 Squadron.  Thanks are due to their commanding
officers and personnel.

Major Simon MacDowall, senior public affairs officer in Edmonton, was an
invaluable guide through the military.  In his absence, Captain Rod Gray
admirably filled the breach.  In Ottawa, Major Don Marsh filled the same
role at National Defence Headquarters, as Bob Russ did at Canadian
Forces Communications Command.

I got to know many Hercules pilots and flight crew, all of whom were
helpful guides to the characteristics of this gutsy and versatile
aircraft.  Major Paul Baldasero, Major Marvin Macauley, and Major Jim
Burger were three of the best teachers.

The SARtechs are a world unto themselves.  We took a while to size each
other up, but I came to admire them greatly.  The names of the SARtechs
I interviewed are all mentioned in the appendix, and I thank them.  They
are a boisterous, generous, kind, and competent group.  They are humble
in their actions.  I hope this account helps to increase awareness of
their contribution to the country, in daily acts of salvation that go
unrecorded.

Special thanks to Pam Ritchie and Darlene Macauley for opening their
homes.  I grew fond of Jan and Dawn Macauley, and of their beagle, Star.

The Ottawa Citizen, where I while away my working life, provided swift
approval of a leave of absence.  Jim Travers, the editor, extended it
several times without complaint and with good cheer.  I was encouraged
to write the book by my friends and colleagues, notably Roy MacGregor,
Charles Rusnell, Graham Parley, Greg Weston, and Chris Hall.  The
Edmonton journal was generous with its offices, and I thank publisher
Linda Hughes, editor Murdoch Davis, and their staff.

I thank Ron Cohen of Montreal and Paul Edwards of Los Angeles.  Both
acted with integrity, discretion, and a genuine interest in the story.

Neil McNeil provided tangible and moral support, merely adding to my
large storehouse of appreciation.

This book is one of the growing number of tides brought to life by the
remarkable publishing house of Macfarlane Walter & Ross.  John
Macfarlane, Jan Walter, and Gary Ross possess sterling character,
single-minded dedication to quality, and a collaborative approach that
have endeared them to many authors.  I am blessed to find myself in
their stable.

Thanks are due to my copy editor Barbara Czarnecki for her careful
attention to the manuscript.

I am happy for the abiding presence of Marni, and for the measureless
love of Jacqueline.

I am also indebted to the three blue herons, the green heron, the two
pairs of Canada geese, the bald eagle, the mink, the pair of sea otter,
the two pairs of mallards, the four pairs and two spare of wood ducks,
the two pileated woodpeckers, the hummingbird who dances in the
waterfall, the white-tailed doe and her bashful fawn, the golden carp
that rise each day to be fed, as are we all, by hands unseen.  These are
the visible presences of Garyland, where this book was written. Garyland
healed me and taught me .

Gary Ross, its guardian and my editor, taught me even more.

Finally, my gratitude to Nicole Bourget, for her loveliness, and for
having enriched my life.

The book is dedicated to those who did not return, whose names are
recorded on a separate page.  My personal inscription is to my father:
William Alexander Lee, Sergeant (RCMP, retired), regimental number
14848.  In a tattered envelope in the back of a desk drawer, my father
keeps a souvenir of his days in the Mounted Police.  It is a collection
of yellowed newspaper clippings.  They are accounts of the time he
coordinated a search for a lost three-year-old boy in Bragg Creek,
Alberta.  The parents are pictured holding the boy, who was found dirty
but hungry after many days.  The mother is quoted as saying she was very
happy to have her son returned.

I once wondered why those clippings meant so much to him; now I know.
For the many times your love has rescued your son, Dad, this book is for
you.

White Rock, British Columbia

April 1992


Wolf Dreaming

There is at the very top of the earth's land mass, a small outpost
dedicated to the gathering of signals intelligence Located near the
northern extent of Ellesmere Island, 500 miles from the North Pole and
just across Robeson Channel from the tip of Greenland, the Alert
listening post is the most northerly permanent settlement in the world.
Those responsible for the station do their best to discourage any
notoriety from attaching itself to this distinction.  The Canadian
Cabinet's authorization for the establishment of the intelligence post
is sealed.  The Alert operations are classified.  The post cannot be
visited without the approval of the commanders of both the Air Force and
the Communications Command, two of the five elements that make up the
Canadian Armed Forces.

Although a good deal of general information about the polar station can
be gathered from overt sources, the finer details of its operations are
closely held.  Simply put, it's a spy station.  The intelligence it
gathers is distributed within the Communications Security Establishment
in Ottawa and the National Security Agency in Washington.  Neither
organization is known for its public disclosure.

One particular detail of the Alert operation preoccupied Bob Thomson on
the night of October 29,1991.  An outgoing, athletic man of
thirty-eight, Thomson lay in bed at his home in Foxborough, near Trenton
in southern Ontario, trying to concentrate on a copy of Pierre Berton's
book The Great Depression.  But the problem at Alert kept distracting
him.

Thomson would be rising early, to catch the Armed Forces service flight
to the polar station.  It would be a long journey but an interesting
one; he liked to bring back tales of life near the Pole.  His mission on
this voyage was to take responsibility for a military supply problem.
For the life of him, he could not figure out what to do with all those
teddy bears.

Thomson was regional manager Of CANEX, Canadian Forces Exchange, the
company that provides shopping to all of the Canadian Forces postings
around the world.  Its outlets range from large supermarkets to tiny
canteens .

CANEx maintains a store for the 200 or so Canadian Forces personnel at
the Alert station.

Five hundred teddy bears.  Somebody must have had rocks in his head when
he sent that many teddy bears up to Alert .

The cANEx store at Alert is a small one, with very limited space for
inventory, and now Thomson had to find a way to get those teddy bears
out of there.  He could pull, at best, a Priority Seven on the weekly
supply flight, 'space granted if space available." On that normally
scheduled service-one military airlift a week-it might be months before
he got the bears out of Alert and reallocated to another CANEX store. By
then it would be past Christmas, and the bears would be homeless.

Thomson had managed to squeeze some cartons of audio equipment on board
the pending flight north.  These were mainly floor-model stereo systems
from the CANEX store at the Canadian Forces base in Trenton, and he
thought the station's personnel might be feeling the need for music.
People in isolation have a use for Walkmans and compact disc players.

Thomson saw some promise in the fact that, on this trip, the weekly
supply run coincided with an Operation Box Top .

Twice a year, Air Command dedicates three c-130 Hercules medium-sized
transport aircraft to a supply mission to Alert.  Goods are shipped by
sea from Montreal 2,175 miles north to the massive U.S.  air base at
Thule, Greenland, and flown from there by Hercules 420 miles to Alert.
The Box Top flights from Thule to Alert-three planes going twenty-four
hours a day for ten days-ferry virtually all the station's needs for the
ensuing six months: 800,000 gallons of diesel fuel, for the power
generators and heating system; 100,000 gallons of aviation fuel, for the
weekly service; hinds of beef, sides of pork, sacks of flour, cases of
soft drinks, and tons of staples to prepare some 120,000 meals for the
station's personnel; strapped cords of lumber, stacks of drywall, paint
and nails and caulking and screws for the construction crews; engine
parts, lubricants, and fuels for the station's vehicles; sensitive
electronics components, in sealed and padded boxes; computers; clothes;
medical supplies; films; soap.

Some of the Box Top flights to Alert came back empty .

Maybe one of the returning Hercules flights would have room for 500
teddy bears.

By his side, Thomson's wife, Elaine, struggled with a problem of her
own.  She felt strangled by guilt.  She and Bob had met while he was
attached to the Canadian Forces in Borden, Manitoba.  They married and
had moved frequently since: to Cold Lake, in northern Alberta; then to
the extended honeymoon of a posting in Germany; and finally back here to
southern Ontario.  Elaine had always surprised him with her
independence.  On his first day on the job in Germany, she had walked
six miles to join him for lunch, unbothered by the foreign language or
the incomprehensible street names.  It was Elaine who had ferreted out
the Alpine ski clubs and organized their summer bicycle tours through
Provence, embracing life in their new communities and making them home.

The alarm clock-radio was on her side of the bed, and Bob had asked her
to set it for three o'clock.  She had 'forgotten." On this particular
night, she felt vulnerable and dependent and did not want him to leave.
She was being selfish, she knew, but she was bothered by the thought of
spending a solitary week in their new house.  It was bigger than the
places she was accustomed to-a sign of Bob's rising fortunes within
cANEx-and it was still strange to her.  It did not yet feel like home.
She did not relish the prospect of spending her nights alone.

She kissed Bob.  He put his book aside and returned the kiss.  Theirs
was a good marriage, loving and companionable.  Later, after Bob had
turned off the light and said goodnight, Elaine had a change of heart.
She would only make his life more complicated if he missed the flight.
She told herself she was being foolish.  Quietly, without disturbing
him, she reached over and set the alarm.

That evening was a flurry of activity at the Hillier family home in
Trenton, where Sue, a vibrant woman of thirty and the bright light of
the house, was making her final preparations for the same early morning
trip.

Sue had been making lists for weeks, ever since Bob Thomson had phoned
her boss, Aldo, at the Lauraldo Hair Connection in Trenton.  Aldo
couldn't take the hairdressing job Thomson offered because his wife,
Laura, was expecting.  Laura and Aldo owned Lauraldo; Sue Hillier was an
independent who worked at their beauty salon.

So Aldo had told Sue about the job, and Sue had jumped with excitement.
Fantastic!  The North Pole!  This is hilarious, right, but I've just
been reading about the Arctic in National Geographic.  This is great!

Sue did some fast mental calculations.  At Lauraldo, she paid a
50-percent commission to the house.  The commissions were worth it,
because being freelance gave her the freedom and the opportunity to
travel.  In one week at Alert, she could push through an awful lot of
colours and cuts and perms.  She'd pocket all of it-there was no house
take.  And she figured to do a fast trade in hair-care products as well
." What women really need,' she told her boyfriend, 'they don't have at
CANEX.  I mean, CANEX has Head & Shoulders, and that's about it.  And
Christmas is coming up, so what would the men want to send to their
wives?  Well, the suppliers are coming out with their Christmas boxed
sets, and they're a good deal.  I mean, joico shampoo and leave-on
conditioner, and a gel, for nineteen ninety-five?"

So she added boxed sets to her list, which already included hair dryers,
curling irons, scissors, clippers, conditioners, shampoo, perms, and
colours: four boxes, each the size of a card table.  And clothes, which
were important to her trade.  Sue once wore blue jeans to work and the
clientele, let me tell you, they couldn't believe it ." Sue," they said,
"that just -isn't you." And it wasn't.  Sue never again wore denim to
the job.

When Sue Hillier went to work, she had to be immaculate ." Being a
woman," she said, "I'm very picky." Hair and nails perfect, dress slacks
and a sweater, which had to be angora or mohair.  The sweaters cost a
fortune, but they were warm.  Stand by that door, get a gust of cold air
every time a client entered or left, and warmth was all the more
important.

As it would be in the North ." Take extra things,' her mom had suggested
." You never know if an Arctic storm will come up.  You could be stuck
there an extra week."

Adrian was out running errands around town, getting the last-minute
things.  He was a good boyfriend.  They were talking about buying a
house and moving in together, which made the extra income all the more
worthwhile.  He had told her to take extra cash for the American base
exchange at Thule, where they sold Greenland woollens, Mittens and socks
and U.S.  currency were on her list .

Good, reliable Adrian: if there was one problem with their relationship,
it was his job.  He was a bomb disposal expert with the Armed Forces,
and sometimes she worried.  Such a dangerous line of work, especially in
contrast to the bland predictability of her own.

As her final act of preparation, Sue broke her greatgrandmother's cape
out of mothballs.  She had thought long and hard about whether to take
the cape to the Pole .

It was a stunning creation in black velvet.  She'd been giving one young
woman a trim-the woman was stationed at the Trenton air base, and her
hair had to be just so: no longer than the bottom of the collar, no pins
showing under the beret-and the young woman had urged her to take some
fun things, too.  Plus, Halloween was coming, Sue's favorite time of
year.  So she unpacked the cape to admire it.  It was dramatic, with
shoulders out to here, and white satin lining without even a trace of
yellow.  She packed it among her Alert things, along with a black wig.
Darn right, she told herself Come Friday night at the North Pole, I'll
look really scary.

Across town, at the Yukon Lodge in Trenton, some of the radio operators
due to take the same flight north had decided to forgo sleep entirely.
They were heading up to Alert for the full tour, six months in
isolation, and they regarded short-timers such as Sue Hillier and Bob
Thomson with something between envy and disdain.

For Master Corporal Mario Ellefsen, it was his third tour to Alert.  His
trade was known as 'communications research'; in laymen's terms, he was
a radio operator who spoke French, English, and Russian.  His wife,
Tammy Ellefsen, was a radio technician.  They'd met on the job .

This meant it was possible for Ellefsen to talk to his wife about his
work, something he wasn't able to do with many people.

The reason for the Alert station's existence is threefold .

It conducts studies of Arctic weather; some official publications would
have you believe that this is its primary, indeed its only, role.  It
asserts Canada's claim to sovereignty as far north as the Pole, a
function it fulfils by its mere presence.Anditconducts "communications
research,'

a euphemism more tellingly expressed by the official admission that it
'monitors foreign country communications." The principal role of the
station has always been to sniff the Arctic winds for voices speaking in
Russian.  Some of those voices it detected in inter-city telephone calls
in Moscow; some were snatched from satellites; some were intercepted
between aircraft and the ground.

Established in 1958, Alert was a product of the Cold War.  Its location
was chosen because it lay roughly halfway between the capitals of the
communist and capitalist worlds.  Being so near the Pole, it was about
the same distance to anywhere on the same latitude.  Geographical
concepts become distorted as the lines of longitude converge: Alert is
2,160 miles from Edmonton, the nearest Canadian city.  But it is closer
to Stockholm, which is about 2,000 miles distant.  It is closer to the
Latvian port of Riga, a metropolis of Cold War intrigue, than to its own
supply base of Trenton.

Ellefsen had pulled his first tour of the station just after his
marriage.  He and Tammy had taken a three-week honeymoon and visited her
family in Nova Scotia.  She took the first separation hard.  By the time
his second tour rolled around, they had a newborn daughter, and Tammy
had taken his six-month absence even harder.  For this third tour, he
would be leaving behind two daughters, aged four and two.  Tammy had
cried every night for the past week .

Ellefsen had arranged for another radio operator, Private Bill Vance, to
share a ride with him to the Ottawa bus terminal.  Tammy would cry all
the way home if she drove him, and that wouldn't be safe.  Sure enough,
when he walked out the door, Tammy had started crying; then the girls,
who couldn't understand, had started crying; and then Ellefsen had
started bawling, too.  He waved goodbye and stepped into the cab with
Vance, who himself had recently become engaged.  It was a custom among
those going to Alert to have recently become engaged, mained, or
imminent parents, as it is before enforced absences in wartime.

Ellefsen planned to spend the months of Arctic darkness working out at
the gym; his goal was three hours of exercise a day.  At least he would
return fit.  Leisure pastimes are not in shortage at Alert.  The station
has two five-pin bowling lanes with an automatic pin-setter.  It has a
curling rink with two sheets of, paradoxically, artificial ice.  There
is a rock club and a camera club, a library, a closed-circuit television
station, and a radio station where anyone can be a disc jockey for a
day.  There is a recording studio, and a theatre with 150 seats.  There
is plenty of wholesome activity, precisely because the personnel,
Ellefsen included, regard the posting as a desolate, bleak interlude in
their Armed Forces careers.

No amount of entertainment, however, could distract him from his fears
that he was losing his daughters forever, and that their faith in him
would be irreparably shaken.  For the next six months, he would be able
to call his wife and children for only twenty minutes every five days on
the radio-telephone.  Relationships tended to suffer when the
conversations began, "I love you.  Over." As a result, perhaps, Alert
amounts to a school for problem drinkers .

Much of the social life revolves around the alcohol found in each
barracks common room and at the mess.

There are three messes.  Commissioned officers drink at the "bridal
suite," the sergeants and warrant officers at the "old folks' home,' and
the junior ranks at "Club 180"named for the number of days in a tour.
Discipline is not rigidly enforced.  The chief warrant officer,
responsible for enforcement of rules and a feared figure in the South,
is invariably named "Valentine" at Alert.  The mess steward doesn't wear
a shirt, so Club 180 can boast of having the Arctic's only topless bar.

At Alert, the men and women pass the time and wait for the Hercules
transport that will take them home-their "Herkie bird," they call it.
There are two tours at Alert.  The May-to-November tour is better,
because the sun, once risen, never sets.  For outings, there is a single
road from the base to Crystal Mountain, so called because of the natural
ice cave that forms in the winter months and opens, like a melting
cathedral, in the summer.  The November-to-May tour, on the other hand,
requires stoic endurance.  It is spent in near-complete darkness; the
road is closed, and storms lash the station with little warning.  It is
during this tour that the order to "button up' is regularly given, each
time a storm front moves in from the Pole.  Vehicles are driven to
shelter, furnace fuels are topped up, stray personnel are gathered
indoors.  Then a detail, known as "the hangmen,' strings ropes between
the buildings. Visibility during Aretic storms is often reduced to zero.
For three hours or three days, until the storm blows itself out, the
staff are imprisoned by the elements.  They have little with which to
hide their time but hard drink and Herkie-bird dreams.

Ellefsen and Vance were joined at the Ottawa bus terminal by Master
Seaman Douglas Montgomery, known as Monty, another radio specialist.
They travelled together to the lodge in Trenton and debated whether to
sleep.  They had brought beer and ordered pizza, and at about one
o'clock in the morning they drifted off, despite their intention to stay
awake through their last night in "the world." Then a friend of
Ellefsen's hammered on the door, and the two men sat talking until two
o'clock.  Two hours later, the three radio operators dragged themselves
to the base air terminal.

It was four-thirty in the morning when they arrived; their orders had
instructed them to show up no later than four.  When they got there, the
doors were locked.  The terminal wouldn't open for another half-hour.
The men shoved hands into pockets and stamped their feet to keep warm.
Wasn't it frigging typical of the frigging military?

While her fellow passengers shivered in the cold, Sue Hillier was waking
up.  She hated waiting and had set her alarm for four-thirty, giving
herself just enough time to shower and dress before Adrian picked her up
and drove her to the air terminal.

Sue was in the kitchen, waiting, when her mother padded in, dressed in
her nightgown and slippers.  Marg made coffee while they chatted. Around
the Hillier household, Sue was the morning songbird, and this morning
she had plenty to sing about.  Did she have everything on her list?
Would Adrian arrive on time?  She began to worry about missing the
flight.

They sat across from each other, with their cups of coffee.  Her mother
provided the reassuring backbeat.  I shouldn't think so, dear.  Oh, of
course he will, don't worry .

Sue and her mother enjoyed each other's company, especially at this
hour, when everyone else was asleep.  At one point Marg caught herself
staring oddly at her daughter.

"What is it, Mom?"

Oh nothing, Marg said.  She never had been a morning person, that's all,
and look, there's Adrian now, time to run.

They kissed goodbye, Marg wished her a safe trip, and Sue bundled out
the door with her many bags and boxes .

Then the kitchen was still again, and Marg finished her coffee in
troubled silence.

She'd dreamed that she had seen herself die.  They had put her in a
coffin, placed the coffin in the earth, and shoveled dirt on top of her.
It was cold, and utterly black, and the earth spilled onto her face.
Sipping her coffee, Marg shivered at the recollection of trying to push
the cold black dirt away with her hands.

Adrian's lights swept across the kitchen wall.  Sue had known something
was wrong, Marg thought, but it was better that I didn't tell her.
Buried alive, yet!  No sense worrying her with an old woman's silly
dreams.

There were thirteen passengers on the service flight from Trenton to
Thule, a trip of almost eight hours.  At Thule they would change planes
before continuing up to Alert.  Two of the passengers-Sue Hillier and
Bob Thomson-were civilians.  Others were supply specialists, going up to
sort out a new computer link meant to ease the formidable logistics of
supplying such a remote installation.  The rest, with one exception,
were radio technicians and operators, in for the full six-month tour.

The exception was a fresh-faced young captain named Wilma de Groot,
recently graduated from medical school .

She was being sent to Alert for a week of routine examinations and
treatment.  The station has two medical aides but no qualified doctor on
permanent staff.  De Groot, just out of training and on the low end of
the pecking order, was given the assignment.

Elaine Thomson pulled up at the terminal to drop off Bob-she had not
only set the alarm but driven him to the base to see him off.  Thomson
noticed de Groot for the first time as he approached the check-in
counter.  She was arguing with the junior rank on duty.  De Groot had
packed the Arctic clothing assigned to her into a duffel bag, and she
wanted it checked onto the aircraft as baggage.  The junior rank told
her she would have to unpack the kit and carry it on board as hand
luggage.  Those were the rules.  No exceptions.  The baggage clerk stood
on regulation where he could not stand on rank.

"Oh, all right,' de Groot snapped.  She grabbed her bag and walked off.

"First-timer,' Thomson told the baggage clerk as he took de Groot's
place at the counter.

The clerk shrugged ." First-timer, old-timer, don't matter.  Rules is
rules."

Thomson walked over to her after checking his own things.  'Saw you
getting a hard time."

De Groot mumbled something.

"I know the rules sound arbitrary," Thomson said .

"But you really do need your Arctic gear up there.  You never know.  A
storm could come in and we'd be stuck in Thule for a week."

De Groot gave him a dismissive smile.  She had other things on her mind,
which had made her snippy at the baggage counter.  She didn't like
carrying the bag of Arctic kit.  The kit contained a knee-length parka
with hood, feltlined Arctic mitts, and mukluks.  It was bulky.  But more
troubling was the thought of leaving George.  It was hard enough being
newlywed and separated, living in Trenton while George finished his
internship at St.  Michael's Hospital in Toronto.  The last thing she
needed was to lose one of their precious shared weekends, especially
since they had planned to celebrate her twenty-sixth birthday.  But
then, George had a way of keeping in touch.

Are you listening, George?  She never knew, could never tell whether
George was tuned to her frequency.  She would find out later, when they
saw each other again.  It was like that, being married to a psychic when
you had no such powers of your own.  It seemed that all her primary
relationships were with people who were, at the least, empaths and, at
the most, like George, virtual mind readers.  De Groot considered
herself about as psychic as a tongue depressor.  But she accepted her
special connection with George even though she could not claim to
understand it.

I love you, George.  Maybe he'd pick that up.  I love you and I have to
carry all this stupid Arctic gear on board.  It's heavy and it's
awkward.  That's why I was upset.  She had to explain her emotions to
him.  That, too, was part of being married to a psychic.  You had
responsibility for two emotional lives, your partner's as well as your
own.

The embarkation announcement came over the public address system, and
the thirteen passengers bundled their gear, headed out into the
darkness, and boarded the plane .

The Hercules is not a comfortable way to fly.  It is loud, it vibrates,
and the seats are nothing more than hard nylon webbing arranged in bench
rows.  There are rows along each side of the aircraft, and a central row
with seats placed back-to-back.  The passengers sit facing the sides or
the middle of the aircraft, not the front as in commercial aviation.
They must wear hearing protectors, and conversation is next to
impossible. It is dim in the cabin, and cool.

The long flight to the U.S.  base at Thule was uneventful.  The
passengers read when they could or nestled among the cargo and tried to
catch some sleep.  As they headed north up the coast of Greenland, Sue
Hillier was thrilled to see her first iceberg through the porthole.  It
was a gloriously shimmering greenish-white presence, a resplendent
cathedral of ice.

The passengers had expected to spend the night in Thule, but there was
no room in the transient quarters .

Instead, they were told, space would be made available for them on the
next Box Top flight to Alert.  The three Hercules craft were shuttling
back and forth continuously, so there wouldn't be much delay.  They were
loaded into a waiting area, devoid of furniture save for a few hard
chairs and a coffee machine.  Coffee was twenty-five cents, and the
machine didn't take Canadian quarters.

This was as close as Sue would get to U.S.  shopping, as she learned
when she checked the notice board and found that the base store would
not be open until four o'clock in the afternoon.  They were scheduled to
leave on their Box Top flight at three.

"Great,' she said, to no one in particular.  'Here I am with American
dollars up to the yins-yang, and I can't even get a cup of coffee."

" You must be a civilian,' said Wilma de Groot.

Pleased to share the company of another woman, Sue began chatting-about
hair, which she always found a convenient opener.  You really should
think about doing something, you know.  just because you're in the
military is no reason not to do something with your hair.  Most of my
clients are from the military.  You'd be surprised what you can do and
still stay within the restrictions.  ...

Their chat was interrupted by the public address system, announcing that
Box Top 22 was loaded with fuel,

baggage, Bob's stereos, and Sue's many boxes of hair-care products, and
was ready for departure.

Sue was surprised to learn she would be on a 'wet lift,' a transport
carrying a cargo of diesel fuel.  She had heard these flights were
awful, smelling of diesel that clung to the clothing for days
afterwards.  But she was pleasantly surprised when she stepped inside.
This Hercules was older than the one they'd taken from Trenton, but the
fuel tank inside was new.  It was also airtight, for the cabin smelled
fresh and cold.

Sue took her seatand began to read a novel in preparation for takeoff.
She had grabbed the book from Adrian's extensive collection of
science-fiction paperbacks.  This one was about time travel.  She liked
such stories, because they filled your mind with fanciful possibilities.
Like, if the plane passed through a time warp and Sue had spent the rest
of her life in some distant past, she never would have got on this
airplane, in which case she couldn't have gone back in time in the first
place.  ...

In Emergency at St.  Michael's Hospital, George Iwanchyshyn looked up at
the clock.  They'll be leaving Thule soon, he thought.  He'd been
married to Wilma six weeks and liked to stay in close touch.  He began
to reach out to her in his mind, but then Emergency was inundated with
trauma cases and he put thoughts of her aside, bending to his grisly
work.

George had not had a chance to tell Wilma about his parents' dream.  On
the eye of her departure, somewhere in the hours between Elaine
Thomson's decision to set the alarm clock and the arrival of the radio
operators at the air terminal, George's parents had woken at the same
time from a troubled sleep.

"What is the matter, dear?" asked Mr.  Iwanchyshyn.

"I had a dream,' said Mrs.  lwanchyshyn.

"About a dog?"

"Yes, a big one." 'I had the same dream.  Let's look it up." The elderly
couple drew on their dressing gowns and consulted an old and valued
family text.  It was a compendium of dreams and omens, brought from
Ukraine.  As they read, they realized that all the dream symbols, and
the combination of those symbols, pointed in the same direction.

"What do we do?" she asked.

"There is nothing to do now, except wait."

They had both dreamed of a giant dog, so big it must have been a wolf.
Yes, it was definitely a wolf.  It had been running across the snow in
pursuit of some people.  just who the people were, neither could say.
But they both remembered the beast clearly: its snapping jaws, its red
tongue, its angry snarl, and the saliva dripping from its teeth.

Wilma de Groot's in-laws looked at each other in wonderment and horror.
For they had both, at the end of the dream, in the moment just before
waking, seen blood upon the snow.

Clockwork

Thule is located on the west coast of Greenland near the 76th parallel,
at about the same latitude as Grise Fjord on the southern tip of
Ellesmere Island.  It is surrounded by the largest ice sheet in the
northern hemisphere, which covers four-fifths of the country to an
average depth of about a mile.

Greenland may be a desolate place, but the United States recognized its
strategic importance after World War II, when it administered the Danish
island as a protectorate.  Under a NATO agreement, the U.S.  in 1951
began construction of a mammoth air and radar base.  By 1960, the
Americans had even installed the first nuclear reactors on the ancient
ice cap.  These were built a prudent 140 miles inland at Camp Century,
which has supplied the base at Thule with abundant heat and light ever
since.

That same year, the Canadian Forces at Alert resisted the temptation to
litter the Arctic with nuclear waste.  They were hauling their water by
stoneboat from a well and warming it one pot at a time on Coleman
heaters.  They warmed their huts with a diesel-fired furnace and read
old paperbacks by the light provided by a diesel generator.  For runway
lights, they stuffed gasoline-soaked newspaper into barrels and set them
on fire.

Avionics have improved significantly since, of course, and at the Thule
air base they are as advanced as anywhere else.  But Thule is a
difficult airfield.  The Greenland ice cap to the south and east is an
area of such severe air turbulence that a loud warning is printed on
United States Air Force approach plates and air navigation charts.  When
the wind is coming off the ice cap, the turbulence extends to the
approach and departure flight paths, which run east to west.

This happens often.  Thule is a place of such violent weather patterns
that aircraft left outside overnight, even large transports, are parked
with their noses pointed into the prevailing wind.  Otherwise they run
the risk of being flipped over.  Hercules pilots are not allowed to park
their aircraft outside when the wind springs up at Thule.  They have to
head south.

The airfield is also surrounded by high terrain and obstacles.  The
runway is at an elevation of 167 feet above sea level on the west end,
rising to 251 feet on the east .

About two miles east of the runway there is an obstacle 1,800 feet high.
A few miles to the south, the terrain rises to nearly 3,000 feet.  This
presents an obstacle that aircraft on a missed approach must climb and
bank sharply to avoid.  Thule is an airfield that demands experience and
skill of its air crews, which is why Hercules commanders preferred a
seasoned crew on this run.

Captain John Couch had been making the run for three days now.  He did
not have a seasoned crew.  Two of its members were "pipeliners,'
graduates on their firsttourof duty.  This had concerned Couch at first,
though it was not his style to make a fuss.  He'd just kept a close eye
on them .

This was their third run between Thule and Alert, and with each flight
his confidence in them had grown.

The two flight officers in the Hercules sit beside each other, with the
aircraft commander in the left seat and the first officer in the right.
Taking his seat, Couch nodded to his first officer.  Lieutenant Joe
Bales smiled back, a broad, toothsome beam.  Bales had the rangy frame,
big hands, and ingenuous face of a farm boy.  When Couch looked at
Bales, however, what he saw was 500 hours' experience, only half of them
on the Hercules.  Couch himself had 3,500 hours.

Bales was an enthusiastic pilot who had gained flying experience before
attending the Canadian Forces flight training school in Moose jaw.  In
pilot training, though, the largest propeller-driven aircraft that
recruits learn to fly is the single-engine, two-seat Musketeer.  It has
an engine generating 180 horsepower, which puts it in the rubberband
category of aircraft power plants.  After that, recruits can move
directly into the four-engine Hercules.  The training system makes them
knowledgeable about the aircraft and capable of flying it from one point
to another, but there's no teaching experience.

This policy of putting pipeliners into the first officer's seat of the
Hercules had led to a growing unease among the more seasoned aircraft
commanders.  The simple fact was that a kid could be walking down the
streets of Moose Jaw one day and occupying the copilot's seat of a
Hercules one year later.  Within another eighteen months, he could be
aircraft commander.  There have been Hercules aircraft commanders of
twenty-two years of age and eighteen months on the Hercules; as one
experienced pilot said: "No ciwy operation in their right mind would do
that."

That young man or woman might know the book on the Hercules.  But he or
she would have had no time to acquire air sense.  The policy had been
compounded by a high attrition rate and a designated three-year tour of
duty .

It meant that one-third of the flying officers every year were new on
the job.  Those aircraft commanders who elected to stay on the flight
deck felt themselves prematurely aged .

They also worried about becoming prematurely embalmed.

If John Couch had been unsure of his first officer, he had amplified the
sentiment for the navigator in the back.  When the navigator spoke over
the intercom, Couch heard a voice that trembled like a sprig.  Although
Lieutenant Michael Moore had more than I,100 hours on the Hercules, he
was

a youth of twenty-five summers.  He looked as though he would be more
comfortable using a compass to guide a Boy Scout trek through the woods
than steering a mediumsized transport across the High Arctic.  Still, he
was performing capably on the Box Top runs, gaining composure with every
flight.

At least the engineer was experienced.  Sergeant Paul West, just over
Couch's shoulder, was an immeasurable relief to the pilot.  West was an
old hand, and a steady one .

A little on the touchy side, maybe, being damn near a perfectionist; but
he was as reliable as Old Paint.  West had spent more than five years as
engineer in a search and rescue squadron; Couch also had search and
rescue experience.  Both men believed there were no more demanding
flight conditions than those encountered in search and rescue, and they
gave each other credit for the experience.

" Flight engineer's prestart check complete,' said West.

The lengthy list of preflight checks began.  Couch, with his right hand,
edged the four condition levers from "ground stop' to "first forward."
The aircraft hummed to life as energy ran through the circuits.

Kt ATM'S on.  Move external power."

"Check."

Joe Bales monitored and confirmed the checks.  At thirty-three, he was a
year older than Couch but appeared much younger.  In part, it was a
physical distinction: Couch was baking and had a mature set to his brow
and mouth; Bales had a thick patch of dark hair and a boyish eye.  But
it was also a difference in bearing.  Couch's thousands of hours in the
left seat of the Hercules showed in the smooth way he moved through the
preflight routine.  Bales was eager to demonstrate his competence, eager
for not the slightest mistake.

"Is three clear?" West asked into the microphone.

"Number three engine clear," came the reply from the ground crew,
confirming there was nothing in the way of the propellers.

"Turning three," said Couch.  He turned off the fuel enrichment-the
engines would still be warm, and there was no sense in beefing up the
enrichment and risking a stall or torching the engine, the equivalent of
a flaming backfire.  He engaged the starter motor, and it cranked the
turbine of the inboard engine until it reached about 20 percent of its
available revolutions per minute.  The engine ignited with a mighty roar
and raced on its own as it rapidly gained acceleration.

"Ignition.  Oil pressure.  Hydraulic pressure,' called West, reading the
vital signs of the engine.  It climbed to ground idle speed, allowing
the aircraft's generator to turn the other engines.

"Is number four clear?"

"Four engine clear."

"Bleeds on four."

"Turning four."

Both the right-hand engines were now turning.  The ground crew on the
runway below, exhaling great white drafts of breath, hauled away the
external power generator.  The two left-hand engines were started in
sequence .

The flight deck rumbled more loudly but somewhat more evenly, as engines
took hold on either side.  The Hercules is a noisy aircraft even on the
ground, and normal conversation was now impossible in the cockpit.

"Pretaxi check,' Couch called ." Compass systems."

"In gyro,' said Moore ." Number one at two five seven, number two at two
five eight."

This sequence was pleasing to Couch.  The procedure had been scripted
long before, by design and experience, and everyone had only to follow
the script with religious technicality.  All pilots are aware of the
thinness of the parchment, woven of physics and mechanical engineering,
that keeps their heavy metal afloat in a sea of either.  They have
different ways of coping with the surreal dream of flight.  Some thrive
on adversity, believing that challenge hones individual judgment, and
that judgment provides a sort of surface tension under the machine.
Others need regularity and routine; they believe the system will work
and the machine will not break if the proper steps are followed.  All
pilots, of course, have a place for both their own air sense and their
respect for procedure; but all fall more on one side of the balance than
on the other.  Couch was a systems man.

"Radio.  Radio altimeter.  Navaids.  iFF."

"On stand-by pilot."

Over the headset, air traffic control at Thule provided takeoff
clearance, departure frequencies, headings, and altitudes.  The
controller described a precise flight plan that would be rigidly
followed.  The Hercules would not plunge blindly into space but would
follow a track as clearly as if wagons had plowed ahead, carving ruts
through the sky .

After two runs to Alert in the past three days, Couch could have done it
in his sleep.

West turned the dials above his head, applying forward and aft
anti-skid.  Couch checked his weight load-24,000 pounds of diesel fuel
and thirteen passengers.  Passengers, of course.  This was the flight
that was transporting personnel as well as cargo.  He called for a taxi
check.  The aircraft's landing lights were illuminated, sending bright
daggers onto the reflective tarmac.  The Hercules inched ahead.

"Brake check."

The transport lurched to a halt; the flight deck nosed down, then rocked
back up.

"Brakes normal."

They edged ahead once more.  Couch made his final calls for instrument
checks.  He turned the Hercules to the left and right and gently moved
the control surfaces: rudder, elevators, and ailerons.  Often, in cold
weather, they need a little extra persuasion before takeoff.  The
viscosity of the hydraulic fluids increases in the cold, and the
controls have to be coaxed before they agree to full travel.  The Herc
lumbered away from the terminal and past the base operations hangar as
Couch recited the routine confirmation of the departure flight plan. The
flight deck of the Hercules takes a lot of movement during taxi; it
clumps and bobs along like the head of a stomping troll .

With a lurching turn to the left, Box Top 22-the twenty-second flight of
Operation Box Top-took its position on the button of the runway.

"Temperatures are good, let's go."

"Okay, reverse two and three."

"Reverse check."

"Taxi check completed."

The pilots each placed a hand against the throttles to test the power
settings.  Bales' hand went to the throttle levers first, checking the
action of the captain; Couch placed his hand over the knobs at the top.
Both men gazed down the runway.

The Thule runway is 10,000 feet of where the hell are we.  Because it is
built on permafrost, the paved runway is painted white.  In the summer
months, this reflects the weak rays of the sun.  If the runway were
black, the rays would gather on the surface and melt the permafrost
underneath .

The runway would sag, and heave, and crack.  The white paint is a stroke
of genius in the summer months, and a blinding obstacle in the winter
ones.  The runway is bordered with white lights to provide both
perspective and a boundary-but it is white against white.  The imaginary
centre line is difficult to estimate.  Also, the white background
provides camouflage for snow drifts on the apron .

The propellers of the Hercules-even with a clearance of five feet, nine
inches above the ground-have been known to strike these drifts during
taxi.  Frost also accumulates on the white surface, rendering the
nose-wheel steering next to useless.  Thule is a slippery strip.

"Box Top Two Two ready for takeoff,' said Bales.

The throttles were pushed forward, and the Hercules responded with
surprising and loud enthusiasm.  Couch, with his left hand, gently
guided the nose wheel back and forth.  The flight deck adopted the
rocking and yawing motion of a twenty-five-cent ride-'em pony.  The nose
wheel began to lose contact with the runway.

"My wheel," said Couch.  He took over hands-and-feet controls from Bales
." Vee one.  Watch the torque on two." The Hercules passed rotation
speed, and the nose lifted from the runway.  A few seconds later, the
rest of the wheels followed.  The sensation was quite unlike the
cautious climb of a commercial airliner; in comparison, the Herc's
takeoff is nearly vertical.  It was no longer a clumsy creature of the
ground, heavy with the burden of carrying sixty-seven tons.  It had
become weightless, shouldering itself upwards on fat, nimble wings.

Couch began a climb to 8,000 feet and banked to the right.  Outside the
window, the stars of Ursa Major were bright and close on the horizon of
the perpetual night sky .

It almost seemed that he was flying the aircraft into the ladle of the
Dipper itself; then the constellation swung away to his left.  Couch
completed a turn of 100 degrees more than a quarter of the compass-as he
flew to intersect a flight path known as Foxtrot One.

Once the Herc was on this path, Couch would fly the aircraft without
need of reference to the real world.  He merely needed to consult a
prominent instrument called the horizontal situation indicator, or HSI.
There is a small white depiction of an airplane in the centre of the
instrument, in a stationary position with its nose pointed straight up.
But the window also contains a floating white line, called the track
bar.  This white bar corresponds with the wagon rut furrowed across the
sky; and the little white airplane and the track bar together tell the
pilot his position relative to the desired course.

To get on course, the pilot need only fly the little white airplane
until it intersects the little white line, and follow it .

To his senses, he is keeping a track bar centred vertically through the
airplane on the Hsi.  In reality, he is piloting a boxcar of metal at
speeds of 240 knots at a height of nearly two miles above the surface of
the earth.  (Aviators measure their airspeed in knots, or nautical miles
per hour.  One nautical mile is 1.15 miles or 1.852 kilometros.  In
other words, Couch's airspeed was 275 miles per hour.)

The white needle would take him to an imaginary target known as Way
Point Frini, two degrees longitude to the north.  From there he would
steer a course to Way Point Henry, on the 80th parallel, about halfway
to Alert.  Then he'd enter uncontrolled airspace, and the flight deck of
the Hercules would be navigating on its own resources.

For weeks, it seemed, Carol Couch had been out of sorts.  She had grown
increasingly resentful of John's work, and the time it took him away
from home; especially since the girls, aged three and one, had come
along.  When Couch had been called up for the Gulf War, she'd been
beside herself.  Why couldn't they send someone else?  Couch had said it
was his duty; but duty, she knew, would not raise the children if he
were killed.

Some wives adapted to military routine, or lack of routine, and
established their own lives independent of their husbands.  Base wives
formed a community with other base wives for support and companionship.
Carol had no such support system.  She and John had chosen to live off
the base, in an Edmonton suburb not popular among the military.  Their
family friends were civilians.  It was almost as though she pretended he
weren't in the military at all.

"How long are you gone this time?" she had asked at their last dinner
before the Box Top mission.

Couch had hesitated ." Ten days."

"You know,' she said dispiritedly, "sometimes I think I only grew my
hair long so that I could pull it out." Perhaps to head off the
well-beaten topic of his frequent absences, Couch added: "I really don't
want to go."

This was odd; he never complained about his work.  She waited.

"I don't.  It's the crew.  I don't want to fly with them." This was
equally odd.  Couch seldom brought his work home.

"They're green.  The first officer's a pipeliner.  They're getting
greener all the time."

When Couch got back from Alert, she promised herself, they would have
another talk about finding work with the airlines.

"Well,' she had said, 'you're not getting any younger."

Box Top 22 passed Way Point Henry, continuing its flight to an imaginary
line at which control of the flight was handed over from Sondrestrom,
Greenland, to controllers in Edmonton.  The aircraft was now flying on
autopilot, 19,000 feet above the frozen Kennedy Channel.  It was a clear
night, without blemish.  A half-moon buffed the wings of the old
Hercules.

"Should I call up the weather?" Bales asked.

"Go ahead,' said Couch.

"Alert radio, Alert radio.  Box Top Two Two.  Flight level one niner
zero, enroute to Alert.  Estimating Alert at sixteen thirty. Requesting
latest Alert weather, please."

"Box Top Two Two, latest Alert weather is ceiling and vis unlimited,
temp minus two two, surface wind calm, altimeter two niner six four."

Perfect flying weather.

At about 100 nautical miles out, the Hercules was acquired by tacan at
Alert.  Tacan-tactical air navigation-is a primary navigational aid that
will provide the aircraft with all the information it needs to reach the
field safely.  The tacan needle circled around the dial a few times,
homing in on the signal.  It then held a position as it locked on.

Box Top 22 was heading into port.  It was time for Couch to begin the
approach check with the flight crew.  He briefed them for a precision
instrument approach, using the mnemonic AmoRiTs-approach, minimum
altitudes, overshoot procedure, radios, transition, timings, and speeds
.

Reaching down, he set the bug on the radar altimeter to 380 feet.  This
was his decision height on the approach to Alert .

At 3 8 0 feet, the warning light would glow yellow, reminding the pilot
that it was time to decide whether to complete or abort the landing.

"Want to give Glow Worm a call?" Couch asked Bales.

"Yes, sir.  Will request descent seventy-five miles."

Glow Worm is the code name for a precision approach radar.  It tells the
pilot whether the aircraft is to the left or right of the runway, and
whether it is on the correct glide path.  It is not normally part of the
navigational aids at Alert, but it had been installed for Operation Box
Top as a safety measure.  The equipment is second to none, for if Air
Transport Group lacked modern navigational aids in its aircraft, it was
a whiz at setting them up on the ground .

Given a flat, relatively hard piece of terrain, Air Transport Group can
set up two self-contained airfields anywhere in the world, from the
precision radar right down to 8,000 feet of runway lights and the
generator to run them.

The Glow Worm in Alert was capable of seeing an aircraft in a plan
display, or from above, out to a distance of 200 nautical miles.  Within
forty nautical miles, it can also generate an elevation, seeing the
aircraft in altitude .

The aircraft is not, however, switched over to this mode until final
approach.  The system was working, but the operator could not see how
close the aircraft was to the ground.

"Glow Worm, this is Box Top Two Two,' said Bales, "requesting descent in
approximately fifteen minutes."

"Box Top Two Two is identified,' said Glow Worm .

"Ninety-two miles west grid.  Pilot's discretion.  You may descend to
ten thousand initially."

The real problem with pipeliners, Couch mused, is you had to be riding
them all the time.  It was built into the system.  The Hercules uses a
pilot-monitored approach.

The copilot actually does the hands-and-feet flying until the aircraft
is close to the airport.  Then the aircraft commander takes over.  This
doubled the pilot's responsibility .

You had to fly the plane, and when you weren't flying you had to watch
over the other guy flying the plane.

Pilots had to be tough on the first officers, but Couch did not like
conflict or aggressiveness, least of all on his flight deck .

There was enough stress in the military, there was enough on the street,
there was plenty in domestic life; Couch was disinclined to wind the
spring any tighter than it had to be wound.  He decided to take over. 'I
have control," he said.

"You have control,' said Bales, confirming the switchover, as he'd been
taught.

It had been hard for Couch in flight training.  Instructors had berated
him for his pliant attitude, tried to roughen his edges.  In tactical
airlift, which requires assertiveness at the controls, his instructor
had told him: 'John, you're a nice guy.  Too nice, you know?  You're too
nice a guy for your own good." They had ragged his butt again when he
took the aircraft commander's course .

"You've got to be seen to be more of a leader,' his instructor had told
him.  'You're not in the right seat any more.  You can't just sit back
and let things happen."

Eventually, it had become well known around the squadron.  Fellow pilots
ribbed him: 'Hey, John, did you take your aggressive pills today?  Need
any ugly pills?" It got to be a standing joke.

Couch was intelligent and well liked.  He was regarded as a competent
and cool-headed pilot.  But it bothered him that people thought it a
fault that he was easygoing.  When something had to get done, he made
sure it got done.  He just didn't wring his hands over it.

The aircraft passed over the rocky coastline of Ellesmere Island and
began plying an overland course to Alert.  Couch decided once again to
be a nice guy.

Box Top 22 had left Thule on schedule, but Box Top 21-the twenty-first
ferry flight of the mission-was actually behind him.  It had been
delayed by a small mechanical malfunction and was now twenty minutes'
flight time to his rear.  This did not cause Couch a problem, but he was
thinking ahead, trying to be helpful.  There is limited space on the
apron in Alert, and the delay of Box Top 21 would mean that all three
Box Top flights would be on the ground at once-his, the one behind him,
and the flight running twenty-five minutes ahead.

Couch foresaw congestion at the bulk fuel storage tanks, where he was
supposed to off-load his cargo of heating fuel.  The tanks were located
on the apron by the approach end of the runway.  Offloading took about
fifteen minutes.  If Couch could speed up his arrival at Alert, he could
be nearly emptied and ready for takeoff by the time Box Top 21 arrived.

The easiest way of expediting his arrival was to make a visual approach.
It would cut the time needed to fly the precision circuit for an
instrument landing and save perhaps five minutes.  It was a clear night
with superb visibility .

The runway lights could already be seen, fifty nautical miles away. They
looked like a flat bar, running at right angles to the aircraft and
directly ahead of its nose.  The lights and the stars were all that
Couch could see, but he could see them with brilliant clarity.  The
lights at Alert were a haven, and they suckered him.

Even in mid-afternoon, the frozen land of rock beneath Box Top 22 was in
utter darkness.  Couch had no night vision.  The instrument and cockpit
lights had been lit since Thule, and the Hercules flight deck is
illuminated by white light.  Even at low levels, white light bleaches
out a pigment called rhodopsin-visual purple-from the rod cells of the
eye, and without rhodopsin, a person has no night vision .

It takes at least half an hour after exposure to white light for
rhodopsin to form again.  With the exception of the runway, the
landscape was carpeted in black velvet.  Couch could see neither terrain
nor horizon.  He was flying what pilots call a 'black hole' approach. He
could no more distinguish the degrees of darkness beneath him than if he
were blind.

The graveyard of aviation is littered with pilots who attempted a black
hole approach.  Black holes throw visual tricks at the pilot.  The first
of these was uncovered by a Boeing scientist, Dr.  Conrad Kraft, after
accidents downed four Boeing 727 commercial jets in rapid succession in
the 1970s at Chicago, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City, and Tokyo .

In each case, the pilot crashed short of the runway during a clear night
approach.

Kraft took twelve of Boeing's most experienced captains and had them fly
a simulator.  They had an average age of forty-four years and nearly
1,000 hours of flight time, just about the ideal profile of an aircraft
commander.  Kraft asked them to make an approach towards a well-lit city
during clear night conditions.  The only instrument they were denied was
their altimeter.  All felt the task would be easy.  Eleven of the twelve
crashed short of the runway.  The only one who made it was an ex-Navy
carrier pilot.

Even though the pilots'line of sight was in line with the runway, they
flew the aircraft along a banana-shaped are, consistently overestimating
their height above ground .

Kraft concluded that a black hole approach exceeded human ability, and
the crashes were no more pilot error than if the pilots had been asked
to fly an aircraft requiring stick forces far exceeding human strength.
He determined that ideal conditions for a black hole include 'an
approach over dark land or water where lights to the side and below the
aircraft do not exist." The problem is compounded on airfields that,
like Alert, are lower than the surrounding terrain.

A report prepared for the United States Air Force School of Aerospace
Medicine confirmed the black hole effect, adding that "the worst case is
when only the runway lights are visible." The Air Force physicians had
precisely described the flight conditions facing John Couch.  The fact
that he could see the runway lights was not a reason to switch to visual
flight; on the contrary, it was a reason to pay strict attention to the
dials.

So Couch was almost certain to misjudge his altitude; he was also
certain to misjudge his distance.  Depth and distance perception are
even trickier on a clear night than on a cloudy one.  jects appear to be
remarkably closer than they are.  In clear winter conditions, distances
are compressed by as much as a factor of ten.  Couch was lulled into a
sense of security by the very thing that endangered him: the clarity of
the air and the brilliance of the runway lights.

"Joe,' said Couch.  'Clear us for visual, will you?" Bales pressed the
microphone switch and spoke to Alert ." Glow Worm, maintaining ten
thousand.  I have the airport in sight.  Am going visual." 'Roger, Box
Top.  Cleared for visual approach." Inside the flight deck, Couch turned
the rotary switch on his horizontal situation indicator from 'tacan' to
'heading." The white needle on the HSI no longer pointed the way to the
airfield, and the instrument no longer gave his bearing.  If he wanted
that information, he now had to look at a small instrument placed to the
bottom right of the central display, the BDHI (bearing, distance,
heading indicator).  That instrument is not part of the T-shaped
instrument scan.

The instrument scan is the very least attention a pilot is instructed to
pay the dials, even in visual flight.  The scan will tell the pilot with
absolute certainty the position of the aircraft in relation to time and
space.  It will not, however, tell him the relationship of the aircraft
to the ground.

For that measurement, the entire flight deck relies on the radar
altimeter.  It is tucked away in the lower left of the instrument panel,
and, like the tacan, is not part of the Tscan.  So, almost as though
correcting an oversight, designers enhanced the role of the radar
altimeter by connecting it to a small warning light on the top centre of
the control panel. About an inch by an inch and a half, the light glows
yellow when the aircraft falls below a determined height above the
ground.  The light reads, "Altitude low."

It is an old kit, and not considered terribly reliable.  For one thing,
the radar altimeter hunts for a while after being switched on, taking
several soundings before deciding its altitude.  While hunting, the
needle swings back and forth, briefly illuminating the warning light. It
can similarly become unsure of itself over rolling terrain, taking
several soundings before it gets a sure fix.

For such a large transport, the warning system was ancient.  But then,
so was the aircraft itself.  Couch's Hercules was an E series, tail
number 322, built twenty-five years earlier.  Its ground warning system
was as old as some of the first officers that flew it.  The modern alarm
is called a ground proximity warning system, which pilots call "Bitching
Betty" or "Bitching Bob," depending on whether the voice is male or
female.  In either, a radar warning causes a loud voice to pierce the
cockpit, repeating, "Too low, too low, pull up, pull up,' until
corrective action is taken.  Couch's Here did not have Bitching Betty,
but this shortcoming was not considered a hazard, certainly not for an
experienced crew.

Scanning the dials, Couch read whether he was straight and level, his
airspeed, and his altitude above sea level.  But he knew neither his
position relative to the airfield nor his height above the ground.  He
knew nothing, in other words, about his location in space.  He was
flying blind, no differently than if he were attempting to walk across a
darkened room towards a point of light without bumping into the
furniture.

The single point of light at Alert grew in the windscreen until it
became twin rows.  The airfield resembled a constellation in the shape
of a pier, set against a coal-black sky .

Couch was flying on a north-northwesterly course, with the airfield dead
ahead.  A few miles farther on, and slightly to his left, was a mountain
peak rising 1,800 feet above sea level.

To his right, however, the hills were lower, climbing no higher than
1,200 feet.  These hills were gentle in their roll and crest, being
composed mainly of fragmented shale and covered with snow.  Beyond them
was the Arctic Ocean, a fearsome landscape in comparison.  There, sharp
blocks of ice ground one another into crested ridges and tore apart
along sharp fault lines; ice floes the size of small farms collided and
thrust pressure ridges hundreds of feet into the air.  Couch swung his
aircraft to the right, towards the coast.  He began a descent to 3,900
feet.

"Commencing downwind leg, level and thirty-nine,' Couch said ." Better
tell Glow Worm."

Normally, pilots set up for the downwind leg roughly a mile from the
runway.  They fly parallel to the runway until past it, then double back
and land against the wind .

But Couch had turned off course a good twelve nautical miles from Alert.
The airfield appeared much closer .

Couch was impatient to get down to circuit altitude.  Less than two
minutes passed, and he hailed Moore on the intercom.

"Nay, I'm going fifteen hundred feet,' Couch said ." Is that fine?"

Moore looked at his radar scope.  Flat, smooth water shows up black on
the scope, since there are no sharp edges to reflect the radar signal.
Terrain, on the other hand, shows up orange, as the radar bounces off
trees, buildings, cliffs, and so on.  The aircraft was over the black;
it was evidently over the water.

"Yes, that's fine."

Had Moore studied his tacan indicator, he would have realized there was
something quite wrong with his radar reading.  In the imagined world of
night flying, tacan projects a giant bicycle wheel across the sky.  Each
spoke on the wheel is a numbered radial-there are 360 of them,
corresponding to the degrees of a compass.  Tacan also measures the
length along the spoke between the aircraft and the runway. Tacan, in
other words, projects bearing and distance-all that is needed to orient
the aircraft in the horizontal dimensions.

On the Hercules, the tacan information is displayed twice: once on the
tacan instrument itself, and again, if tacan is selected, on the
horizontal situation indicator.  But Couch had switched the larger
instrument to show his heading rather than his relation to tacan.
Nonetheless, the smaller tacan instrument still showed the radial.  But
no one, neither Couch nor Bales nor Moore, looked at it.  If they had,
they would have seen that the aircraft had not yet passed the 210
radial.  As published on their approach diagram-all three had one-the
aircraft would not be over water until it was east of the 170 radial.  A
glance at the tacan dial would have told them that a descent to 1,500
feet was unwise.  It would barely give them clearance over the range of
hills to the east.

What Moore had seen on his scope was a rare phenomenon called radar
reversal.  In the Arctic, there are no trees or buildings.  Snow is
soft, ice is hard.  The radar was indicating land where there was water,
and vice versa .

Somewhere in navigators' school they talk about radar reversal, but
Moore failed to recognize it.  He'd been suckered.

Couch brought the throttles back and the Hercules slowed to a speed of
160 knots.  He selected 50-percent flap, to provide lift at lower speed.
Although he had called 1,500 feet, no one alerted him as the aircraft
slipped beneath that altitude.  At slower speed, the Hercules dropped,
even though it was still level.  It passed 1,400, and 1,300, and 1,200,
and below.  Couch had fallen prey to the documented illusion of
overestimating height in a black hole.  There should have been a clue:
for the Herc's distance from Alert, the airfield was much too high on
the windscreen.  But that made sense, since the airfield appeared much
closer than it actually was.  No one twigged.

Couch began calling out the lengthy list of landing checks; the
familiar, comforting routine.  The Hercules veered slightly to the
right, just enough for the airfield lights of Alert to disappear behind
his left outboard engine.  Couch realized, perhaps for the first time,
and perhaps with a jolt of alarm, that he really was flying blind.  He
dropped his left wing 20 degrees, expecting that this would bring the
lights back into view.

Death Roll

Like many of the thirteen passengers, Sue Hillier thought the pilot had
merely made a hard landing.  She was seated in the centre row of bench
seats, facing the left of the aircraft, and she'd seen the airfield
lights at Alert through the window.  Feeling the Hercules bank to the
left, she composed herself for touchdown.  When the left wing of the
plane slammed against rock, she remembered her own flight training as an
Air Cadet.  Kind of rough, she thought .

Even I could do better than that.

Then all thoughts were chased from her mind; she stared, dumbfounded, at
the floor of the cabin.  A rock had punctured the floor and was carving
it along the length of the bench seats.

A shark!  The sight of this shark's fill slicing the metal floor of the
Hercules caused such disorientation that her mind refused to make sense
of any further information from the outside world.  The lights of the
aircraft flickered and then went black and she sensed herself leaving
the cabin, still attached to her seat.  All right then, she told
herself, I'm still in my seat.  But she could not accept what her seat
was doing.  It was not attached to the aircraft; it was moving outside.

Sue had braced herself by placing a hand down on the seat beside her,
and she felt the science-fiction novel she'd been reading.  If I lose
this book, she thought, Adrian's going to kill me.  So she struggled to
stuff the book into her pocket as the bench was catapulted through the
torn fuselage and came to rest in the snow.

It's awfully quiet, Sue thought.  Someone must have turned off the
sound.

The Hercules made a tremendous explosion of noise as it began its death
roll.  Heading east, it had caught the crest of a small mountain peak.
The left wing had hit initially, then the underside had struck the
ground.  The Hercules was plowing in an easterly direction along a
plateau.  The crash site sloped gently downwards to a broad and empty
valley.  To the north or to the south, the aircraft would have hit an
area of rugged boulders.  To the west was the steep gorge of the
Sheridan River escarpment, at that point a nearly vertical cliff face of
600 feet.  The Hercules had struck the one point where the passengers
had the best chance of surviving collision with the ground.  People
would later say they were lucky, but they spoke without thought for the
dreadful irony of their words.

The surface was frozen rock, covered with a light layer of snow.  The
aircraft had been travelling at 160 knots.  It ground along for 1,600
feet, careering in a big slow circle to its left, before it came to a
halt.  The crash sequence took a full minute, perhaps longer.  As it
pounded the frozen ground, the aircraft split into three sections.  The
tail cracked off first, just ahead of the loading ramp.  The loadmaster,
Master Corporal Roland Pitre, was thrown out.  He was the first to
litter the crash trail.

The Hercules split again at the bulkhead, and all but two of the
passengers were thrown clear of the fuselage .

Behind them, the bulk fuel container ripped from its moorings.  It was
also thrown clear, and it burst open on impact with the ground.  Nearly
24,000 pounds of diesel fuel sprayed over the site in an eruption of
volcanic proportion, as though a railway car filled with liquid had been
dropped on asphalt from a great height.  The diesel splashed outwards
and sprayed into the air, soaking the snow clear through to the
underlying rock, soaking the wreckage, and soaking every one of the
survivors.

Sue, strapped in her seat in the snow, drenched with diesel fuel,
remembered that this had been a wet flight .

Great, she thought.  I'll never get the smell out of these clothes.  And
where's my hat?

On the flight deck, Couch had responded with a pilot's instincts.  He
gripped the yoke and massaged the rudder pedals, as though the controls
were still of use, as the severed cockpit roared along on its own,
disintegrating on the jagged shards of rock.

In the copilot's seat, Joe Bales could still not grasp what had
happened.  He looked under his feet, and instead of the grey metal floor
he saw white snow rushing past.  He looked at Couch, but the commander
was oblivious to everything but the controls.  Couch's face was as taut
as a clenched fist, and his fists were iron on the control yoke.

Bales looked out the window and saw only a blinding cloud of snow.

It took all this combined evidence for Bales to realize that the
aircraft had struck the ground.  He was paralyzed by the realization.
Near his right ear, he heard a single pop, and then a flushing sound not
unlike the sound of an acetylene torch being lit.  It was the aircraft's
oxygen system.  The lines had ruptured and caught fire.

Directly beneath Bales' feet was a cylinder, similar to the one on a
propane barbecue, loaded with twenty-five pounds of liquid oxygen.  Such
a cylinder contains tremendous energy to feed a fire; oxygen by itself
does not burn but will intensify any flame.  Bales understood that he
would be incinerated.  He reached forward to a small window set into the
curve of the windscreen and pulled a latch.  It refused to give.  The
flame had flourished in the oxygen-rich atmosphere; it was now a solid,
writhing wall behind him.  Bales steadied himself, unlocked the latch,
and pulled again.  The window was small, about the size of a briefcase.
But Bales is a slim man, and he was dressed in nothing more bulky than
his one-piece flight suit.  He dove through head first, fell more than
four body lengths to the ground, and scrambled away.

Cut and bloodied, Bales was otherwise unhurt.  He turned to look for
Couch.  He imagined that the captain had followed him out the window,
but there was no one else on this side of the aircraft.  The cockpit had
become a cauldron, shrieking and hissing; balls of flame rose from it
and coiled away into the black Arctic sky.  The cockpit fell forward
onto its nose as it was cremated.  Aluminum and vinyl, glass and rubber,
everything was turned to acrid gas or melted beyond recognition.

They're dead, Bales thought.  He looked at his watch.  It had been
smashed and was no longer working.  Bales accepted at once that the
plane had crashed, that people were dead and wounded, and that he was in
mortal peril near the North Pole.  But he could not accept that his
watch had stopped working.  He shook his wrist and checked the watch
again and again.

Then a question occurred to him.  That was just the cockpit that was
burning.  Where was the rest of the airplane?  All he could see was the
skeletal outline of what must have been the fuselage, strung with a cage
of wiring .

Hearing moans from that direction, he hurried over.  As he rounded the
cockpit fire, he saw the other flight crew standing in a group.  Three
of them, all in flight suits.  So they're not dead, he thought.

"Joe," said Couch ." You okay?"

Bales nodded ." What- '

"We'll worry about that later,' said Couch.  Like the others, he had
scrambled down the crew stairs and fled the cockpit before its
immolation.  He was the senior officer on the ground.  Here there was no
routine, no script to follow, and he acted decisively ." First we have
to find everyone.  I want to know casualties, and I want everyone in one
place."

It seemed an impossible task.  In the orange light of the fires, they
could see the dark shapes of bodies in the snow, and other dazed
survivors walking about aimlessly.

"We'll work our way back up the crash trail," Couch said ." Spread into
two teams.  Joe and me.  Paul, you stick with Mike."

Not far from the cockpit, one of the flight crew found someone burning
in the snow.  He rushed over and doused the flames, then tried to find a
pulse.  CaptainjudyTr6panier, the dietitian, had been seated in the
right forward seat, directly behind and below Bales, separated from him
by the bulkhead.  Although she would not have seen it, the oxygen tank
had been a few feet from her head.  She had been thrown into the path of
the oxygen fire.  The superheated gases had scalded her lungs; she had
died quickly.

Captain Wilma de Groot-the third woman on board, and the only medical
doctor-had been seated on the same row of bench seats as Sue Hillier. As
the aircraft had turned for its landing, Wilma had asked a fellow
passenger for a laminated card of emergency procedures.  Every aircraft,
civilian and military, has one; they all strike the same reassuring
tone.

."You are flying aboard a Hercules aircraft with an Aircraft Commander
and Crew who are thoroughly trained and experienced," Wilma had read ."
There is little likelihood that a situation will be encountered
requiring use of the aircraft's built-in safety features; however, it is
a good idea to be acquainted with them."

The card assured de Groot that an emergency landing would be preceded by
an announcement and six short rings on the alarm bell.  She should
remove her eyeglasses, dentures, and sharp objects from her pocket,
loosen her tie, and bend over with her hands over her head and her head
tucked between her knees.  There would be a final, long ring of the
alarm bell, and the aircraft would land.  She should remain in her seat
until directed to the nearest

Wilma couldn't finish reading.  The lights had gone out .

The side of the aircraft had been ripped apart and Wilma felt a freezing
wind on her face that made her close her eyes .

Something slammed her left temple, and her head filled with bright
lights and swam with colours.  She is a small woman, and she knew that
her body, still strapped to the twisted frame of the bench, had been
wrenched out of shape.

Wilma asked herself a question.  How much pain can a person feel?  How
much can a person hurt before the pain kills them?

As a medical practitioner, of course, she knew the answer.  Any amount
of pain.  Pain is limitless; it is a function not of death but of
living.  As a practising Christian, she knew that pain was the defining
feature of this fallen world.  The question really didn't lead anywhere
promising.  She decided to open her eyes.

She did not see, as she had hoped, the inside of a passenger cabin.  She
saw instead a clear night sky.  She was still strapped to the bench
seat, and she counted the people along the bench: three beside her, and
two more at her back, still buckled up.  That made six.  Six people.
That's something, she thought.  That's a fact I can use.

She looked at her feet and saw snow.  We've crashed the airplane, she
thought.  Then she chided herself for being foolish.  Wilma, you're
being melodramatic.  This isn't bad enough to be an airplane crash.

She looked slowly around.  Okay, then.  If this isn't an airplane crash,
where's the airplane?

She had herself stumped.  There were pieces of metal strewn about, and
pots of fire here and there.  But there wasn't an airplane, really.  The
fires gave enough light that, if there had been an airplane, she should
have been able to see it.  This was a situation that required more
thought.

As Wilma was trying to make sense of things, Private Bill Vance
staggered into her line of vision.  He was on fire .

The flames were lapping up from his collar and consuming his face. Wilma
unbuckled her safety belt and managed to walk a few steps towards him.
Bill fell into the snow, and Wilma fell on top of him, rolling her body
over his, patting at the flames with her gloved hands until the fire was
out .

His face was charred, and black, and bloody.

Wilma was tempted, as a medical doctor, to study Bill's face more
closely.  It appeared as though his eyes had been burned out.  That's
when she decided she did not want to know more after all.  Coward, she
told herself, and got back to her feet.

Seven, she thought.  Now there are seven.  That's good .

It's a number you can say, it means something.

A voice called to her from the bench seats.  A woman's voice ." Hey,
help.  Help me get this thing off."

Sue Hillier had come to her senses and found herself trapped beneath the
metal bars that had held the bench to the airframe.  She saw someone's
head near her foot, and another foot near the head.  She couldn't move.
A metal bar had been driven into her mouth, slicing off part of her
tongue and smashing a tooth.  She had pulled her mouth free of the bar
and felt her face.  She couldn't tell whether the blood on her hands
came from her mouth or from her face.

Wilma made her way back to the bench seats.  'I'll lift the metal,' she
told Sue, 'but you'll have to pull yourself out."

Sue nodded.  Her eyes, so striking and vibrant, were set and determined.
Sue Hillier could stop a charging bull with her determined look.

"On the count of three,' Wilma said.  'One

2

On "three," Wilma pulled at the metal bar and Sue shoved herself
backwards with her hands.  She managed to pull herself onto her knees
but pain was shooting up from her hips in a nauseating wave, flooding
her back and her skull.  Her eyes opened in astonished distress, and she
fainted.

It was then that Wilma saw the flesh of Sue's thigh and buttocks.  Sue's
boots had been blown off in the crash, her slacks shredded.  The flesh
was lacerated in several places and laid open nearly to the bone; but
the wounds were not bleeding.  No severed arteries, Wilma thought.  The
lacerations must be cauterized by the cold.  The Arctic is an aseptic
environment.  That's good.  That's fortunate.  Lord, but I am in pain.

Wilma had been walking on a broken right ankle; suddenly it would no
longer support her weight.  Her twisted back was excruciating, and the
pain got worse every time she expanded her chest to breathe.  With each
breath, she discovered a new threshold of agony.  Strange that she
hadn't felt it before.  It occurred to her that she had a broken back.
She fell face down in the snow.

Stay conscious, she told herself.  You must stay conscious.  There are
seven.  The airplane has crashed.  You have a broken back.

After a time, Wilma could no longer breathe lying on her face; she
decided to roll over.  As she did, she saw Mike Moore and Paul West come
into her line of vision.

" I'm okay," she said.

She told them there were six others, some with burns and severe
lacerations.  The men set off to help them.  Wilma thought maybe she
could breathe if she pulled herself up into a seated position.  West
returned with a box.

" Here,' he said ." Sit on this."

Wilma asked him the time.  If only she knew the time, that would be
another sure fact to cling to.  West appeared to understand.  Of the
entire crew, he would be the one who would understand.  He looked at his
watch.

"Four-fifteen," he said ." Precisely." She loved him for that, loved him
for saying "precisely." West told her the count.  Four crew members
alive and unhurt.  The fifth, the loadmaster, Roland, was severely
injured with massive traumas.  Of the thirteen passengers, eleven had
been found alive with various degrees of injury.

This blessed man, she thought.  This man who knows the importance of
precision.

West went off to join the other crew members who were back along the
crash trail, ministering to Roland.  It was not a case of preference;
Roland was plainly the most severely injured of the casualties.  Wilma
was left alone on her box.

She looked up at the stars in the sky.  They appeared so much closer
than they did in the South.  Polaris was directly overhead; she had
never before seen it dead centre in the bowl of night.  The air was
clear, with just a few suspended ice crystals glittering in the light of
the fires and the halfmoon.  The stars were close enough to pluck.  The
fires threw a flickering orange light over the snow; it was like a camp
bonfire.  It was remarkably calm, and Wilma did not feel the cold.
Neither did she notice the stench of diesel, or of burnt flesh and
wreckage, or the noise of incineration and human distress.  Nor did she
feel desolate.  She felt instead an indescribable beauty and peace.

Sue Hillier thought for a moment that she would like to take an Arctic
cruise with Adrian.  A client at the salon had told her about it; the
ship leaves from Victoria and sails all the way up the Pacific coast to
Alaska.  A cruise would be romantic, and it truly is beautiful up here.
Adrian really should see it.

Then she felt foolish.  She was trapped in a tangled hunk of metal with
her legs ripped open and what felt like a broken neck.  There were other
people strapped around her, dead for all she knew.  She was on the most
northern tip of land on the planet, not far from the North Pole, and
there was nothing but ice and rock.  She had been in an airplane crash.
The Lauraldo Hair Connection and Adrian and her family were more than
2,500 miles away.  And it really hurt, goddamn it.  The pain was
becoming almost unreal.

"This is a nightmare," she said aloud.  She waited a moment.  'This is
not real," she said more loudly.  She felt her voice becoming
hysterical.  "This is a fucking nightmare!" she screamed.

Wilma felt the pain in Sue's voice and spoke matter-offactly ." If this
is a nightmare, then I'm in your dream.  I'm here with you, and I'm
real."

While Wilma was trying to comfort Sue, they both heard, in the distance,
an odd moaning noise.  It rose above the screams and groans and
crackling flames that had been the constant background noise since the
crash but that no one had noticed, just as no one had yet registered the
cold .

The moaning noise could have been the wind, Wilma thought, except that
the air was still.  She struggled to place the noise and finally
recognized it.  It was the sound of men in lamentation.

It was John Couch and his crew.  They had been watching over their
loadmaster, and Roland had just died .

West had pulled a covering over Roland's face, saying, 'Sorry, buddy,
sorry, sorry,' and the moaning was the chorus of voices of the remaining
crew members, wailing like children into the beautiful night.

Hercules Down

In the freezing darkness of late afternoon, Major Don Hanson stood on
the airfield at Alert, waiting for Box Top 22.  A dark-haired fellow
with the bearing of a thirty-year military man, Hanson was, in military
jargon, the on-scene commander of the airlift control element-the
officer in charge of Operation Box Top.  He had come up from Edmonton
the previous day to oversee the work of the thirty men and women
stationed at Alert for the ten-day supply operation.  There were no
serious problems, other than some leakage from the new bulk fuel
delivery system, and he was heading back to Edmonton.  Box Top 22 would
take him home.

Hanson stamped his feet.  The air was cold and clear .

He checked his watch-4:25 P.m.  The Hercules should have been coming
into view.  He scanned the horizon for the aircraft's navigation lights,
but all the points of light in the sky were steady.  Squinting, looking
carefully for movement, he saw nothing but stars.  He felt a stirring of
unease .

Where was the Herc?

In its first twenty years of Canadian Forces service, Hercules aircraft
had had two accidents, both in April 1967.  The first had been straight
mechanical failure-the forward cargo door blew off, causing a sudden
decompression.  As proof of the Here's claimed ability to land on short
and austere airstrips, the pilot had landed in a field with no injuries.
The second Hercules had crashed during a training mission. All six crew
members on board were killed.

Pilots have a particular way of referring to pilot error .

It applies to the most incongruous of circumstances.  A pilot could be
tasked to fly a Labrador helicopter up a mountain ravine in a howling
storm with visibility shot to hell, and when he miscalculates and slams
into the wall, his colleagues say not that the weather was too bad, or
that the machine was not up to the job, but that he got suckered .

This says much about the way pilots, at least in the Canadian Forces Air
Transport Group, approach the question of judgment.  The sky is a wily
trickster, ready to lure you into a trap at every turn; the good pilot
anticipates these traps and uses care and discrimination to avoid them .

A pilot who falls into a trap has not been malicious, or wilful, or
particularly negligent; he has been duped.

After the "pipeliner" system was introduced in the late 1970s, the
following decade saw four Hercules accidentsa 200-percent increase over
the previous twenty-year total .

The numbers have no statistical significance, but the small, close-knit
community of Hercules aircraft commanders began to draw their own
conclusions.  They began to worry among themselves whether more pilots
were getting suckered.

The worry began after the first of these accidents, or October 15, 1980.
A Hercules from 436 Squadron in Trenton had been called out to help in
the search for an overdue Jet Ranger under the command of a pilot named
Ryan.  All search and rescue missions are named after the lost person,
so this mission became SAR Ryan.

The search for Ryan had taken Hercules 312 to a position near Chapais,
Quebec, northeast of Montreal .

The aircraft was flying low over the woods in clear weather, searching
for wreckage.  The official version of what happened next has been
released to the public by the Director General, Public Affairs,
Department of National Defence .

Hercules commanders concede the official story is accurate,

as far as it goes: "The aircraft commander did not exercise due care and
attention to ensure that the aircraft remained within its operational
envelope prescribed in flying orders .

The pilot descended too low, the aircraft stalled and the pilot failed
to recover."

A stall is a loss of lift from the wings, caused either by a loss of
airspeed or by an increase in the wings'angle of attack through the air.
The commander of the Hercules was on his first operational tour of duty,
flying search and rescue with maybe a year and a half on the Hercules. A
pilot of that experience can fly the Hercules, know a fair bit about its
systems, and travel around the world on radar vectors.  He can land the
Hercules on instruments at just about any airfield with an instrument
landing system.  But he knows little about tight manoeuvres at low
altitude in lousy weather, the daily grind of search and rescue work.
Asking a pipeliner to assume command of a search and rescue aircraft is
like putting a suburban commuter on a Formula One racetrack.

Hercules 312 did not have a stick shaker, a device that warns the pilot
of an incipient stall by literally shaking the control column.  The
Hercules operating instructions explain the stick shaker; the circuits
have been wired for one; older pilots remember a time when they were
installed.  But somewhere along the line the warning device was removed.

Pilots are not supposed to induce a stall within the operational
envelope of the Hercules prescribed in flying orders.

The search for Ryan had been going on for sixteen days; the Quebec
wilderness was stubbornly refusing to yield her dead.  The young
Hercules pilot was crawling over the dense woods at an altitude of
between 700 and 800 feet, trying to spot the shorn crown, the
straight-edge slash, and the torn branches that indicate a crash site.
He banked the aircraft to look at something.  Banked, an airplane loses
both airspeed and lift from the wings.  A heavy airplane loses speed
fast.  The pilot recognized too late that he needed to make a recovery.
He went in with full power selected, 20 degrees nose up.  He floated
into the ground.

There were 34,000 pounds of aviation fuel on board, and ready ignition
in the magnesium flares loaded in the search and rescue pallet.  There
was no hope of survival for the search and rescue technicians in the
rear.  The aircraft flopped in; the wings broke off and rolled
underneath the airframe, soaking the fuselage compartment with fuel from
the auxiliary tanks.  The stricken Hercules laid down a fire trail as it
ran aground, and the fuselage burned away like so much skin.  The
copilot and the engineer clambered out through an emergency window
before the flames got to them.  Everyone else-the remaining crew and an
entire complement of search and rescue specialists-burned to death.

So the explanation given, that 'the aircraft commander did not exercise
due care and attention,' was genuine.  He got suckered.  But error never
fully explains how the parchment ripped, or why the surface tension
suddenly burst beneath the machine.  Was it an error of judgment or of
calculation?  Were the judgments and calculations demanded of the pilot
beyond his personal 'operational envelope"?  If the aircraft was taken
beyond the operational envelope, then why was the pilot not informed?
Why didn't the machine scream out?  Why was there a pipeliner in
command?  If rookies are going to be placed in command, shouldn't you at
least give them a stick shaker?

Hercules aircraft appeared determined to take their share of rookies. On
November 16, 1982, a Hercules from 435 Squadron in Edmonton crashed
while conducting proficiency training.  This one was mechanical error.
If there are times when a pilot makes an error that no aircraft can be
asked to forgive, the same must be said about aircraft; and Hercules 329
appeared to behave with wilful intent.

The Hercules is equipped with a low-altitude parachute extraction
system, which allows it to drop loads by parachute at low speeds from
only a few feet off the ground.  This is something the Hercules is
really good at;

so

the aircraft's party trick, as it were.  The loads are stowed on
pallets, which slide along metal runners the length of the cargo bay to
the tail.  The tail section of the Hercules, which resembles that of a
lobster, is in fact an articulated loading ramp.  In flight, the aft
portion of the tail lifts upwards, and the forward section lowers to a
level flush with the cargo bay.  A drogue chute is propelled out this
opening, which catches the slipstream and in turn drags out the main
extraction parachutes.  These three parachutes each have a diameter of
twenty-eight feet; when they catch the air, they instantly produce a
backward drag of 16,000 pounds.  The pallets are yanked down the rails
and out the ramp.

Hercules 329 descended from a circuit height of 200 feet down to about
five feet and activated the drogue chute.  A transfer mechanism jammed,
preventing the drogue from pulling the main chutes out the door.  The
crew knew instantly something was wrong.  They tried to jettison the
drogue chute, but it was jammed; it also managed to release the
extraction link, a small metal wedge that holds the load in place.  The
pallets began to slide back the length of the aircraft.  They fouled on
the extraction chutes, and a 29,000-pound load was suddenly lodged on
the loading ramp at an altitude of five feet .

This is beyond the operational envelope of the aircraft.  All seven crew
were lost on impact.

The crash of Hercules 330 and 331 was a messy deal .

It reinforced the feeling that experience on the Hercules was vital. The
two aircraft from 435 Squadron in Edmonton collided in mid-air on March
29, 1985.  They were conducting a fly-past to entertain a mess dinner in
commemoration of the sixty-first anniversary of the founding of the
Royal Canadian Air Force.  This may also have been a contributing
factor, since the pilots decided to conduct a tactical fighting
manoeuvre known as the "battle break,' of little or no use in the
operation of the Hercules.  In this exercise, two aircraft flying in
formation break off and peel away sequentially while gaining altitude.
The procedure is no longer approved for the Hercules.

The lead aircraft was under the command of an American pilot on an
exchange program, with much experience in the Hercules; the second
aircraft had a former Snowbird display pilot at the controls and a
pipeliner in the right seat .

Prior to this first tour on the Hercules, the pilot had flown the
faster, more responsive Tutor jet.  The last propeller aircraft for both
captain and copilot was the rubber-andbalsa Musketeer.

Entering the break, the lead aircraft did a gentle, Hercules-style climb
and bank.  The pilot was, in fact, faulted for delaying his own turn by
four or five seconds .

This is still a matter of some debate at the mess; some pilots maintain
he was merely proceeding at the pace a Hercules pilot would naturally
follow.

After the lead aircraft had broken formation, it was temporarily lost to
the sight of the second Hercules.  It floated above and behind the
windscreen.  Although the second pilot had lost visual contact with the
lead aircraft, he had not lost his aggressive style from the Snowbirds.
He gave his Hercules a hard, Tutor-style yank on the control levers.

It is never a good idea to yank an aircraft in the absence of visual
reference to obstacles, especially ones above you .

The pilot had been suckered.  The second Hercules slammed into the belly
of the first, and everyone died: six in Hercules 331 and four in
Hercules 330.

The veterans of the Herc community watched as their copilots grew ever
younger, and calculated whether there was a pattern.  Then, on January
29, 1989, the last of this run of bad luck took place during Operation
Brimfrost at the Wainwright army airfield in Alaska.

Hercules 318 was the second aircraft to fly from Edmonton to Wainwright
in the exercise.  Both the pilot and the copilot were on their second
tour, and experienced; but they were both new on the Hercules.  The crew
checked local weather conditions before landing and received a pilot
report from the first Hercules, which had landed about an hour earlier.
The report indicated that visibility was suitable for night landing but
warned that it deteriorated sharply on landing rollout.  In other words,
the runway was visible from altitude, but ice fog obscured the runway as
the pilot drew closer to the ground. Motorists have seen the same effect
in fog; truckers peer down through the mist with good visibility, while
vehicles closer to the ground are blinded.

The Hercules followed a precision-guided radar approach down the glide
slope, but all precision radars leave the pilot 200 feet above
touchdown.  The pilot got suckered .

His Hercules touched down early, striking the approach lights about 350
feet short of the runway threshold.  The impact sheared the bottom of
the aircraft and broke it into three sections.  The tail section came to
rest, intact, on the threshold.  The right wing and fuselage slid
another 500 feet, spinning in a half-circle and throwing passengers to
their deaths.  The wheels came to rest facing the plane's tail .

Of the eighteen people on board, nine were killed.

The Director of Flight Safety issued another circular, this one warning
pilots to refresh themselves on the numerous visual illusions the sky
can produce, especially in the night Arctic sky.  Once again, the
authorities were dead right.  And once again, the older hands wondered
what the Director of Flight Safety had to say to aircrew whose knowledge
of those illusions was dimly remembered from a lecture hall, but not
from the indelible schooling of the flight deck.

Major Hanson spent ten minutes on the airfield at Alert, studying the
sky intently, before the sick unease in his gut gave way to dead
certainty.  Box Top 22 was overdue without explanation.  He headed for
his air traffic control unit and raised the alarm.  Hercules down.

Hanson checked first with the Glow Worm operator, who reported that Box
Top 22 had been lost from the radar

scope five nautical miles after cancelling instrument flight .

The flight had been missing for about ten minutes.  Hanson, at
fifty-one, was an experienced search and rescue commander.  He knew not
to leap to conclusions, to take things one step at a time.  But it
looked as if Couch had been suckered.

"I want all radios to conduct a communications check on all frequencies.
See if you can raise them.  Get hold of Box Top Two One.  Have them
check all frequencies, too .

Maybe they'll raise something.  Instruct Two One to begin a visual
search over the last reported position."

Hanson established a command post.  He ordered samples taken both from
the aircraft fuel supply and from the bloodstream of the Glow Worm
operator, in case either was contaminated.  Neither was.  The radar and
radio communications tapes were seized and quarantined; so were the
flight manifest and records.  The Hercules already on the ground at
Alert was ordered drained of fuel and replenished from a different
source.

Next, Hanson called for a count of available ground vehicles and
medically trained personnel, in preparation for a search party.  And he
needed a helicopter badly; the radio operators at the Alert command post
began a search for anything, military or civilian, that could make it
from Greenland.  Then there was nothing to do but contact the rescue
centre at Trenton and wait.

At the Canadian Forces base in Edmonton, 2,160 miles to the south, Major
Don Blair was pouring himself the last coffee of his shift.  Blair was
in charge of Edmonton's rescue coordination centre; as long as he was on
duty, he would take responsibility for every lost soul between the
prairies and the North Pole.

The rescue centre was a modest office located just off the base
operations room.  It had a portable computer, and while just about
everybody had elaborate software at home, they ignored the cheapiack
software of the command post's computer in favor of the familiar radio
sets, telephones, and teletype. Edmonton had a caseload of 300 call-outs
a year.  On the coastal stations, or at headquarters in Trenton,
activity climbed to nearly ten times that amount .

Edmonton was a nice, quiet station.  Someone once remarked that the
Edmonton command was like desert air for Blair's nerves.

Blair, a colleague and contemporary of Hanson's, was a wiry,
ginger-haired man and a heavy smoker; hence his nickname, Smokey.  He
was deciding whether to take the walk of shame, down the stairs from the
second floor of Five Hangar to the secure smoking area, when a duty
officer called him over to the teletype.

"Hey, Smokey.  Come take a look at this."

Blair sauntered over.  The machine was hooked up to SARSAT, the search
and rescue satellite-aided tracking system.  The system was founded by
Canada, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States to locate
signals from emergency beacons using satellites in outer space.  Over a
dozen countries now use it.  When a ship or aircraft triggers its
emergency locator beacon, SARSAT detects the signal and sends a notice
to the nearest rescue centre.  Most of the time, SARSAT Will raise a
crash alarm within two hours and direct rescuers to within an accuracy
of eight miles.  Since coming into use in 1982, SARSAT has been credited
with saving 1,500 lives, and it has drastically reduced the time needed
to locate a downed aircraft or ship in distress.  It is also a whirling
pain in the ass.

The SARSAT signal does not discriminate between a real and an imagined
emergency.  A pilot will leave the emergency beacon armed when landing,
jostling it to life.  A farmer will hit a parked aircraft with a
tractor, sending an electronic "Help me!" into the ozone.  Neither will
realize anything is wrong until the yellow rescue aircraft comes flying
overhead.  As at your local fire station, false alarms are more
plentiful than the real thing.

In the case of Box Top 22, of course, the beacon had worked as designed.
It had been thrown a few hundred yards from the crash site and begun
sending a signal on 243 megahertz-the distress channel-that was picked
up by the computers at the search and rescue centre in Trenton .

The computers routed the alarm to Edmonton, where it was printed over
the teletype.

The duty officer showed Blair the printout: "We just got a SARSAT hit
out of Alert."

Both men laughed.  The previous spring, during an earlier Box Top
airlift, an emergency beacon had fallen off a Hercules aircraft in
mid-flight.  The radio beacon is attached to an airfoil, or small wing,
designed to fly clear of the crash site.  The beacon had survived the
fall to pack ice midway between Thule and Alert and had begun issuing a
mayday.  Designed to endure forty-eight hours in those temperatures, the
alarm had in fact sounded continuously for two weeks.  The rescue centre
had to program its computers to ignore the signal.

"Christ,' said Blair ." Another airplane's lost its crash position
indicator.  Now we'll have to listen to that for the next two weeks."

Blair went out for his smoke.  An hour later, after tidying up some
paperwork, he went home.

Don Blair had just walked out the door when the telephone rang.  It was
traffic control, advising the rescue centre that Box Top 22 was an hour
overdue at Alert.  The call was routine paperwork; pilots often forget
to close off their flight plan after landing.  The duty officer picked
up another telephone and called Alert.  Couch would get his wrists
slapped for this.

When the duty officer in Edmonton raised Alert, however, he found out
the matter was anything but routine.  Don Hanson told him there was now
confirmation: Box Top 21 had flown over the crash site and seen fire on
the ground.

Bad news travels fast.  Captain Wayne Todd, Blair's replacement on the
evening shift, was hanging up his coat when the cleaning lady passed
him, pushing a broom .

"You're going to have a busy night," she told him.

Todd went over to the duty officer ." What the hell did she mean by
that?"

"We've got a Box Top down at Alert."

"Jesus," said Todd ." Get Smokey at home and bring him in here.  As a
matter of fact, get everybody in here."

The crash of Box Top 22 was the first major air disaster ever to
confront Canadian Forces search and rescue.  A major air disaster is
classified as an airliner down with more than ten people on board; in
military abbreviation, the situation is called a mAjAiD(pronounced
"mayjade").  A MAJAID plan had been in the works for years, and drafts
of the response plan were securely stored in several offices around the
country.  In the wake of the crash, the plan was activated, although
never officially declared.  No one broke open the book and followed
procedure, because no one needed to.  The book was also stored in the
minds of Hanson, Blair, and Todd.  They had helped write it.

The MAJAID plan called for loading a Hercules aircraft with airborne
troops, along with a medical and survival kit capable of tending eighty
survivors.  There are two such kits, one in Edmonton and the other in
Trenton.  But these kits and troops were to be flown to the crash site
in support of a team that would, according to the plan, already be in
place.  That on-site team would be drawn from a small unit of highly
trained and motivated rescue specialists called SARtechs, search and
rescue technicians.

Warrant Officer Fred Ritchie, the SARtech team leader in Edmonton, was
in many ways an unlikely commander .

He was forty-three years old, absolutely ancient by SARtech standards,
and his favorite activity was inactivity, unlike many of the SARtechs,
who count among their hobbies such hairy-forearm stuff as mountain
climbing and skydiving.

Ritchie liked those, too, but he liked nothing more than to curl up on
his sofa with his head in the lap of his onceand-ever child bride, Pam,
and allow her to stroke what remained of his hair.  He had enjoyed this
particular variation on the theme of doing nothing since he had married
her twenty-two years earlier, immediately started a family of three
sons, and weathered poor pay and long absences until his marriage was as
solid and expansive as his home in a civilian suburb just off the
Edmonton base.

Nothing, in such sweet moments, could drag him from the hearth; neither
his love of bonhomie and revelry, nor the call of the outdoors.  Fred
Ritchie was only half-tamed and needed frequently to be allowed out to
run.  But when he came home, all of him was home.  He had been a
difficult man to unlock, but Pam had come to understand him.

Which is why it was that whenever the telephone rang-as it seemed to
have a knack of doing whenever Ritchie was profoundly at rest-she was
the first, figuratively, to hand him his bags.

"Fred, it's Kobe."

Master Corporal Mike Kobayashi, one of Ritchie's more trusted SARtechs,
went by the name of Kobe.  He was on stand-by duty at the hangar.

"We have a MAJAID" said Kobe.  'Here down at Alert with eighteen souls
on board."

"I'll be right in."

Ritchie is smaller than average height and wiry as a hawser line.  He
has an erect and proud bearing, handed down to him by his father, the
regimental sergeant major.  But his every gesture has the quick
smoothness of the cat.  Wriggling into his flight suit, he looked as
restless as the seven deadly sins.

"Going north, honey."

Pam handed him the bag with a change of underwear, socks, and sweatsuit,
and kissed him goodbye.

A dozen SARtechs in the Edmonton area received such a call, and from the
time they picked up the telephone, drove up to thirty miles to the base,
loaded a Hercules with rescue gear, gathered the aircrew, fuelled the
airplane, received a briefing, and took off into the air, one hour and
twenty-eight minutes had elapsed.  The MAJAID plan calls for a
best-effort response time of two hours.

Fred Ritchie drove without regard for the Highway Traffic Act to the
base, pulling up in front of Four Hangar, where the SARtech equipment is
stored.  He jogged towards the rescue coordination centre at Five
Hangar, a hundred yards away, and met Major Jim Burger coming out.  Good
old Hamburger-thank Christ, thought Ritchie, we got somebody who knows
what the hell he's doing.

Burger, thirty-nine, was one of the more experienced rescue pilots in
the Canadian Forces.  In an air force where many pilots serve one
three-year tour with the SARtechs and then beg off, Burger had been
flying Hercules rescue aircraft since 1978, with one two-year exception.
In his thirties, he had joined an airborne regiment and became a
paratrooper, training alongside soldiers ten years younger .

Burger found the training arduous.  He did it only because no other
pilot wanted the posting, and he received a promise he could go back to
flying rescue work for as long as he liked.  He was, as he said,
'converted, committed, and commissioned" to the role of flying search
and rescue aircraft-or, as the pilots called them, SARhirds.

Burger told Ritchie all that was known.  The Hercules was down ten miles
from Alert.  A fire had been seen on the ground.  There had been no
contact with survivors.

"Who's the pilot?" said Ritchie.

"Couch."

Ritchie had flown his last rescue assignment with John Couch, fifteen
days earlier.  He and Burger both believed there was no chance of
finding anyone alive.  Neither of them expressed the sentiment.

Burger's stand-by Hercules was already loaded with a twenty-person
survival kit, but Ritchie wanted all available gear on board.  There had
never been an all-hands exercise before.  SARtechs usually work in
pairs, but now there were a dozen men hustling around the shop.  They
worked together with quiet precision.  Ritchie assigned the duties .

You, take all the extra parachutes you can find in the folding shed.
You, bundle the personal survival kits in cargo nets.  You, we need a
dozen sets of Arctic kit.

Ground crew hustled the gear into the tail of the Hercules.  It formed
an enormous pile: strobe lights, flashlights, headlamps, marker lights,
radio beacons, radio handsets, jump suits, poopy suits, parachutes,
parkas, signal flares, magnesium flares, streamers, penetration kits,
shell dressings, oxygen cylinders, tourniquets, shock trousers, saline
solution, ringer's lactate, back boards, body bags.

Ritchie noticed Master Corporal Jim Brown strapping snowshoes to his
B-25 kit, a personal survival bundle .

Nothing much that Brown did could surprise him.  Brown came from a farm
near Innisfail, ninety miles south, and he'd been known to drop in on
the folks by parachute while returning from a mission.  That was one of
the more sensible things he did.

"Jim, what are those?"

"Snowshoes, Fred."

"Have you ever seen an Eskimo wearing snowshoes?"

"No, Fred."

"Get rid of the snowshoes, Jim."

Brown unstrapped the snowshoes but kept his helmet .

Brown's helmet is easy to spot.  Someone had attached a warning label to
the forehead: "Explosive." It probably dated to the time Brown dropped
down to a rubber liferaft in the stormy North Atlantic to hoist up two
survivors from a sunken vessel.

The first hoist to the rescue helicopter went poorly.

Brown placed the ring around the crewman's chest and held him to his
own.  Then he told him, as is standard procedure, "Grab your crotch."
This is the best way to remind survivors to keep their arms down, so
they won't slip out of the hoist.  The advice was wasted, as the crewman
didn't speak English.  The two were swamped by a wave as they left the
raft, and were pulled along for about thirty feet under water before
they broke clear.  By now the crewman was limp.  Brown held him as the
cable swung in a wild, 60-degree are, all the while hoisting them up to
the Labrador helicopter at 300 feet per minute.

When Brown returned to the rubber raft, the second crewman refused to be
rescued.  He just sat there, clutching the raft and shaking his head.
Brown wasn't in the mood for arguing with some ungrateful son-of-a-gun
over gale force winds and towering waves.  He unsheathed his marlinspike
and punctured the liferaft.  As the raft deflated, Brown raised his
eyebrows at the crewman.  The crewman, wide-eyed, nodded in return.

Fred Ritchie admired that kind of spirit.  He made a mental note to
assign Brown as the team leader on the mission.

Two sets of air crews had boarded the Hercules, so they could relieve
each other at the controls.  Burger and his copilot, Captain Derek
Stobbs, would fly the first leg.  The aircraft was loaded and ready for
takeoff when two things delayed departure.

The first was a problem with the fuel gauges.  Although the tanks should
all have been filled, the gauges were showing that one auxiliary tank
under the wing was 2,000 pounds short.  While Burger was sorting out the
calculations, it began to snow a freezing slush.  Another delay was
called while the wings were de-iced.

The SARtechs were waiting impatiently in the back when Master Corporal
Ron Condly noticed the cause of the second delay: the morphine kits were
missing.  The premeasured syringes were locked in the base hospital,
about a quarter-mile away.  He leaped out the aircraft door to get them.
Ritchie yelled after him that they would not wait for him to get back.

Condly commandeered a passing jeep and had the driver take him to the
medical unit.  He told the driver to wait, and ran inside.  There, he
was confronted with medical orderlies of a bureaucratic frame of mind
and no understanding of the SARtechs' authorization to draw from the
morphine supply .

There was a quick and heated discussion.  Condly impressed upon the
staff his willingness to tear the narcotics stores from the wall with
his bare hands if necessary, but that he would prefer to smash the
cabinet open with their thick skulls; and in the end, reason prevailed.

A SARtech must be fit.  The fitness standards are higher than those of
the regular military; SARtechs must, for example, be able to run one and
a half miles, do thirty-one push-ups, thirty-three sit-ups, and eight
chin-ups, do another 500-meter run, and climb two twenty-foot ropes, all
without rest and within seventeen minutes.  Condly was grateful for this
training as he ran out into the freezing snow with the morphine kit
under his arm, for the jeep and driver were gone.  He sprinted back to
the Hercules.  When his partners pulled Condly into the door, the
Hercules had already begun to taxi.

Three hours had passed since the crash.  With any luck, Burger
calculated, he'd have Ritchie's SARtechs over the scene in seven hours.
Ten hours total since the crash.

He called up the Alert weather forecast and got disheartening news.
Visibility and ceiling were falling, winds were on the rise.  A fierce
Arctic storm was brewing at the Pole, and it was headed towards
Ellesmere Island.

Burger selected maximum continuous power.  The turbine inlet temperature
of the Hercules roared to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit-the
equivalent of red-lining a sports car's tachometer.  Burger pushed the
SARhird into the night sky towards its top speed of over 310 knots.  It
was suddenly a race between the aircraft and the elements, and the storm
had all the advantages.

The Wasteland

Bob Thomson's journey into misery had begun with sudden cold and
darkness.  One moment he had been airborne, preoccupied with thoughts of
his wife and the CANEX post at Alert, and the next moment his body had
been pummeled by the equipment that had been on the walls of the
Hercules.  He had held his hands up to his face, warding off the blows,
then had felt himself being launched.

The least I could do is get unconscious, he'd thought.

Don't tell me I'm going to have to stay awake until I die.

Bob had landed in the snow, on the same metal bench frame as Sue Hillier
and Wilma de Groot.  His body was cruelly bent.  His first lumbar
vertebra was smashed, and his left leg was curled backwards, pressed up
against his buttock in such a way that his heel was behind his ear.  His
right leg was splayed out at an odd 45-degree angle, twisted away from
the thigh.  He had no idea it was possible to feel such pain.  Death in
a plane crash was supposed to be quick.

Don't tell me I've got to live through this.  Please.  Not this.

Bob began to feel anger at being spared from death.  He looked around,
not so much for help as from resentment .

He saw people walking, lit by the orange light of the fires .

It infuriated him that other people could walk.  They'd all gone through
the same crash.  There they were, walking away scot-free, and here he
was, contorted in metal and ice.

It wasn't a question of fairness.  Fairness hadn't entered his mind.
Neither did he think it was wrong, or a waste.  He only knew that he was
deeply hurt and his response was anger.  He was blind with anger that
his luck had run out.

As a younger man, Bob had been a one-day celebrity in the Toronto
newspapers for having survived an unusual accident .

He had been engaged in horseplay around a railway trestle, and a boulder
had rolled free and crushed his back.  He'd been rescued after some
hours, and he'd walked away with no lasting injuries.  His entire life
had gone like that.  He had married the woman he set out to marry, and
the marriage had worked beautifully.  He'd got every job he wanted, at
times through lucky circumstance.  His jobs had allowed him to ski
across Europe, sail off Bermuda, and build his ideal home.  Bob Thomson
envied no one; he had lived his dreams.

Now the charm was off his life, and it didn't make him despondent or
baffled or humble.  It made him mad.

Bob was able to hold his torso more or less erect by planting his hands
in the snow; he found the most comfortable position was to lean slightly
forward, over the displaced left hip.  He decided to study just how much
of the bloom had gone.  When he'd been trapped under the boulder, he'd
been unable to feel his legs.  He had thought then that his back was
broken, but it wasn't.  The sensation was similar this time, except for
the intensity of the pain .

He allowed himself to hope.

"You've been through worse than this, Thomson," he said aloud.

But he knew it was a lie.

He tried to move the right leg.  He consciously willed himself to bring
the leg in, pull it under his buttocks, and raise himself to a squatting
position.  The behaviour of the leg astonished him.  It began to flop
about like a landed fish .

It felt as though an electrical current was passing through it.  It
flopped frantically until he stopped trying to move it, and then it lay
still, senseless and apart from him.

Thomson, he thought, this is really bad.

How bad?  He decided to take stock.  One hand was resting on a jagged
spar of square metal, which seemed also to have impaled his legs and
back.  He had no gloves, but he was wearing a parka, wind pants, and
lined galoshes.  He could hear moaning.  The air was calm.

He noticed that he was sweating profusely.  Then he realized that his
heart had begun pounding in his chest.  Not the regular, hard beating he
could get from a workout on the bicycle, but an insanely rapid-fire
hammering.  His chest was exploding; he could actually feel the walls of
his chest throbbing outwards as if someone were in there, beating the
ribs with fists.  The pressure filled his throat, distended his skull,
and caused his eyes to swim.  He waited for his heart to burst, but it
would not.  He could hear each heartbeat clearly, more a whack now than
a thump, and he expected at any moment to hear silence.

Bob did not realize that this was his body's moment of decision.  His
autonomic nervous system was going to either shut down all engines or
else transfer remaining power to those that still worked.

Bob waited for his body's decision.  He sat that way for perhaps half an
hour, oblivious to everything but his body's bizarre torment.  Then the
beating subsided, winding down so much that he thought it was winding
down altogether, that this, finally, was his exit.  Then it leveled out
at a normal rhythm, and the pressure from within disappeared .

He stopped the profuse sweating, but by then he was soaked through with
both sweat and diesel fuel.

He looked up, returning to the world.  Sergeant Paul West was standing
above him.

"Anything I can do?" said West.

Bob thought for a moment ." I'm getting cold.  I could use a hat."

The pain from his chest had allied itself with the stabbing in his lower
back, a continuous circuit of pain; below that, he could feel nothing.
Half his body had been taken from him; the other half tortured him.

In the few minutes immediately following the crash, Bob Thomson believed
he had hit bottom.  To remain conscious through your own destruction
seemed a fate that could not be surpassed.  He believed his misery had
been the worst that life could deliver.

Now, as the sounds of human grief registered in his brain and the
breathtaking cold began its slow, insidious invasion, he understood that
the misery had barely begun.

It is hard to imagine the place where the survivors found themselves. It
was as alien to them as the surface of the moon.  Those from the cities
had to begin by taking away.  There was no built environment of any
kind.  The works of people had not reached this place; the foot of man
had perhaps never trod it.  The Inuit had never dared to live this far
north; in their tongue, the name for this place was "The land of the
land beyond people." Explorers had seldom wintered its coast.

There were no straight lines here, and the survivors' eyes had learned
over a lifetime to order the world along straight lines.  So their
perceptions drew inwards, away from this alien place.  Many maintained
little awareness of anything beyond the span of their own arms and legs.

They were, oddly, in a desert environment, a region that receives scant
precipitation, most of it in the form of snow that blows and drifts to
varying depths.  In the summer, the survivors might have found blue
grass, chickweed, arctic poppy, saxifrage, arctic willow, and mountain
aven.  These are pretty plants but would have provided little
sustenance.  Perhaps they could have found reindeer moss, and boiled
that.  In summer, they might have seen glaucous and ivory gulls,
long-tailed j aegers, sandpipers, snow buntings, oldsquaws, and,
perhaps, snow geese.  But it was not summer.

It was almost November, and the stillness of the land was disturbed only
by arctic hares and the swift movement of the arctic fox.  Both were
white, and nearly indistinguishable from the landscape.  They were as
difficult to see as the little people who, according to the beliefs of
the Inuit to the south, also lived among the snow and rocks.  Even more
rarely seen were arctic wolves.

Insect life, which causes intolerable suffering in the tundra, had
virtually disappeared this close to the Pole .

Spiders, deer flies, and warble flies are seen on Ellesmere Island in
summer; but by this last day of October they were gone.  Not even
microbe life was active, a blessing to those lying on the snow with
dreadful wounds-a torn scalp, a smashed eye socket, a compound fracture,
or a puncturethat at least would not develop infection.

The land was as God began, before the first day of Creation.  It was
formless and void, and darkness lay over the surface of the deep.  There
was no light.  From the 10th of October there is no direct sunlight, but
each day has a few hours of twilight.  The last official day of twilight
is October 30, the day of the crash.  There were a few hours around
midday when the darkness would slightly lift; but this was neither
daylight nor twilight, merely a subtle lessening of the gloom.

The surface of the land consisted entirely of broken slates and shales.
These were in flat shards, for the most part the size of a plate or a
foot.  Where the rock had not broken down, it formed square-edged
boulders; where it had, it formed undulating hills that fell into steep
ravines.  On the shoreline, the rock turned to a fine dust.  It was a
primitive land.  The ancient snow among the rocks turned to ice; ice and
rock were the foundation.  Above that, the snow was blown about until it
lost its fringes and became a hard, granular sand of depth hoar .

The newer snow was layered above this frozen grit.  The surface was
driven by the wind into a hard, icy crust.  The snow was poor for
insulation and poorer still for walking.  It was the worst of snows.

And it was cold.  The temperature was 22 degrees below zero on the
Celsius scale.  At the moment of impact, the temperature of the air
enveloping the survivors had plummeted 40 degrees Celsius, or more than
70 degrees Fahrenheit .

In still conditions, a temperature of -22 Celsius gives a wind chill
categorized by meteorologists as "cold." Even the slightest wind
intensifies this cold dramatically.  Wind speed of three miles an
hour-the wind generated merely by walking-doubles the heat loss caused
by wind chill.  Simply by walking, in other words, a survivor subjected
himself to a temperature that meteorologists categorize as "very cold."

When Paul West returned to Bob Thomson with a wool tuque and gently
pulled it on Thomson's head, Thomson thought it was on crooked.  He
wanted it straightened and pulled down, but West had gone away again.

There were others in more serious trouble.  Bales and Couch had followed
the sounds of moaning back along the crash trail to the remaining
portion of the fuselage.  It was a jumbled mess of wiring and twisted
spars, charred to blackness.  Bales had spotted a body straddled over
the wiring, high in the wreckage and in a prone position.  Fires were
lapping around the m.  an, and he would soon be burned alive.  He was
calling for help.

Bales climbed up to get him.  He tugged the man free, pulling him out
through the clutter and onto the snow.  He went around the fuselage to
the other side, where Couch was already at work pulling out a second
man.  With these last two survivors clear of the wreckage, Bales went
back to where he had left the first man, Master Warrant Officer Tom
Jardine.

Among his many wounds, jardine had evidently punctured his lungs.  He
was having great difficulty breathing, and Bales wrapped his arms about
him, trying to find a position that would allow jardine to inhale.  It
was a lost cause; his ribs had punctured the lungs.  With each breath,
air was drawn into the chest cavity, squeezing the lung and reducing its
capacity.  He was suffocating by his own attempts to breathe.

"What's your name?" Bales asked.

,:I'm Tom," the man whispered .

"Where you from?"

"Moose jaw."

The words were banal and small, Bales knew, but they were important.  No
one should die without a name.

"My wife is in Moose Jaw right now," Bales said ." Her name is Dianne.
I'm Joe."

"Help me, Joe.  It hurts bad."

The words made a simple request.  This is a gentle man, Bales thought. A
good man.  He searched himself for some knowledge that could be of help,
but came up with nothing .

He tried instead to comfort him.

Bales held Tom Jardine in his arms, the dying man's head against his
cheek.  He prayed that the man would be given just one good breath. Then
the blood spilled from jardine's lungs, and Bales felt helpless and
ashamed.  He was miserable at his own escape from injury.  Abruptly
jardine stopped breathing.

"Tom.Tom?"

Bales had never before been this close to death.  He got up,
disoriented, and walked over to Couch ." He died.  He just ...  died."

"This one's alive," said Couch ." Let's carry him to the Doc."

The crew had been gathering bits of scattered survival gear while they
searched for the survivors, and had uncoyered an intact sleeping bag.
They now put the man Couch had helped, Warrant Officer Robert Grimsley,
into it.  The bag was a mummy style, without closure or zipper; it was
difficult to get an unconscious body inside.  But once Grimsley was
securely wrapped, they could half drag, half carry him to where Wilma
was seated.

Bales was heartened to be doing something of use.  They set Grimsley
down by the fire, and Bales bent over to speak to him.  But the air
around Grimsley's mouth was perfectly still; his breath did not fog the
air.

"He's stopped breathing."

Bales placed a hand on the man's neck, searching for a pulse.  'No
heartbeat." Bales began to pull down the sleeping bag, calling for his
crewmates to help him perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation.  He looked
to Wilma de Groot-she was a medical doctor, after all.

"Don't,' she said.

"What?" Bales snapped.  His frustration and anxiety were near the
breaking point.

"It only works if you're close to a hospital.  Are we close to a
hospital?"

" We have to try something," Bales said urgently.

"Joe," Wilma said gently, "we don't know what killed him, but CPR won't
bring him back.  I know it sounds cut and dried.  But if it was enough
to kill him, we don't have the resources.  He didn't die of a heart
attack."

"This is something I can do!  I can do this!"

"Joe, let it go."

He glared at her, but he knew she was right.  Gingerly, he removed
Grimsley's tuque; it would be needed.  But it was a good half-hour
before he could bring himself to claim the sleeping bag.

Wilma de Groot stared at Grimsley's lifeless body and wondered whether
God was a hypocrite.  She was a practising adherent of a small Mennonite
denomination.  But, in a society that anaesthetizes pain, she had never
before grappled with the problem of suffering.

She wondered if a loving God would allow the airplane to crash.  God the
Creator had made the beautiful night, but he had also made this
desperate land.  God had allowed her to live, and taken the life of this
man.  He made it to rain on the good and the bad alike, and caused the
sun to shine also.

Except there was no sun in this place.  Wilma thought of profound
matters, but no profound insights came to her .

Bad things happen.  She had always, in a detached sort of way, known
that.  It was not a perfect world.

She remembered that once, in Rome, she had visited the Sistine Chapel,
and she had taken the steps up the dome of St.  Peter's.  They were so
steep and high, it seemed she was entering the vault of Heaven itself
She had been frightened then, and she had calmed herself with a hymn.
She began to hum it now to herself: "It is well with my soul." It is a
slow, melodic, soothing melody, and it carried over the surviving
passengers, over the blood and snow, and over the dead.

God had allowed her to suffer, and she could not understand that.  But
she had to choose.  She could turn to him, or turn her back to him.  She
was frec to decide, and her suffering had brought about this freedom.
Curious thought.  She knew that love must be given freely, or it becomes
a sort of death.

She resigned herself.  All right, then, I choose to let you help me. But
I'm not going to become more religious.  I'm not cutting any deals with
you.  You can help if you want .

But I'm not promising anything.

Wilma de Groot did a mental calculation, performing the subtraction.  We
were eighteen, she thought.  Now we are fourteen.

Good Buddies

The thoughts of Warrant officer Arnold Macauley were not, on the
afternoon of October 30, dwelling on the mysteries of God and his works.
They were verging on the blasphemous, and occupied with the works of a
Honda marine pump.

Arnie had spent the day trying to kill the pump, but the pump was not a
quitter.  He had it rigged up to a water barrel and ran it through a few
trials.  At first, he just held a garden hose in his hand and made a few
threatening passes at the pump.  That was usually enough to stop the
marine pumps supplied to Arnie and the other SARtechs in Greenwood, Nova
Scotia.  The regulation marine pump was afraid of water.  Not this
Honda, though.  Arnie held a jet of water steadily over the motor.  The
Honda didn't even cough.  He sprayed water directly into the air filter.
Didn't matter.

A big, handsome, square-shouldered man with tattooed forearms and a
prairie way of talking, Arnic Macauley was the team leader of the
SARtech unit in Greenwood .

Most of their call-outs were to rescue ships in distress .

Much of the time, the ships were taking on water.  So the SARtechs had
devised a SKAD kit-Sea Kit, Air Droppableto help out such boats.  It was
a watertight steel drum that could be dropped upwind of a struggling
vessel, with a retrieval line passing over the decks.  The sailors
hauled it on board and helped themselves to the items inside, including
the marine pump.

Except that the regulation pump was an abject failure .

It wasn't a marine pump, really, just a small two-stroke Briggs and
Stratton engine with a pump on the side.  The aif filter was made of the
same paper that filters coffee; as soon as it got wet, the engine would
choke to death.  Arnie had started trying to get a replacement pump more
than four years earlier.  In the military, these things take time.

A lot of time.  The average wait, between filing a Statement of
Operational Requirement and getting the replacement, is five years.
Unlike most standing forces, Canada's military is not trusted simply to
go out and buy things.  Proper channels must be followed.  The SARtechs'
request for equipment must fit into the global budget of the Air
Command, must not be pushed off the ledger by, say, a new whatsit for
the Twin Huey helicopter.  If approved by the commander of the Air
Command, the request is handled by the federal Department of Supply and
Services in Ottawa, which invites tenders from suppliers.  Canadian
suppliers receive preferred treatment.  The tenders are for the
specifications, not the gear itself-if SARtechs admire an all-singing,
all-dancing, waterproof, fireproof Japanese radio, then a Canadian
manufacturer must be given the chance to produce a cheaper equivalent.
As if. War, von Clausewitz suggested, is the pursuit of politics by
other means; the Canadian Cabinet has broadened that dictum to include
the pursuit of patronage.  The federal Cabinet is not interested in
articulating the role and policy objectives of the Canadian Forces, but
it is keenly interested in getting its hands on all that loot.  The
purchasing program of the Forces comes under Cabinet review and has
become a convenient means of distributing federal largesse to preferred
regions and companies.  Whether the contract is to service a fleet of
CF-18 fighters or to build a new fleet of frigates, the Cabinet tends to
make the decision as inefficient and corrupt as legally possible.  In
the face of such political stakes, the needs of a few SARtechs are
easily overlooked.

SARtechs jump, for example, with parachute canopies that are, with minor
changes, identical to those used at Arnheim during World War II.  The
square parafoil canopy, which is safer, more responsive, and in
worldwide use, is being tested by the Canadian Forces.  It has been in
the testing process for twelve years; in the meantime, there have been a
lot of broken limbs.  The SARtechs' request for a new radio battery is,
at this writing, five years old.  Their marker lights routinely fail or
bust up.  They have no night vision goggles, although they often jump at
night.  They don't have the global positioning system, which uses a
common, hand-held navigational unit that can be purchased wholesale in
the U.S.  for about $4,000.  In the Gulf War, U.S.  forces used the
units to deliver pizza.

Cabinet meddling in the procurement policy is a great way to bestow
favours on Quebec when that province needs stroking, or to create jobs
in the Maritimes when times there are tougher than usual.  But it's a
lousy way to equip an army.

When the Briggs and Stratton pump failed on a marine rescue in the North
Atlantic, forcing one of Arnie's boys to hoist down and end up
perilously adrift in heavy seas, Arnie, tired of waiting, took matters
into his own hands .

He telephoned the American supplier of the Briggs and Stratton.  The
supplier told him they had stopped making that model eight years
earlier.  Couldn't be a worse marine pump in the free world, the
supplier reckoned.  You ought to try our new model-you'd think it had
gills.  Arnie asked if anyone still bought the old model.

"Just one buyer," the supplier told him.  "The Canadian military."

Arnie decided to find out what else was out there, which was how he came
to be standing in the SARtech shed with a garden hose and a Honda pump.
The Honda had not come through official channels.  Arnie's boys had ...
well, kind of noticed it fall off a Coast Guard vessel.  What with all
the paperwork, it would take a couple of months to send it back.

Arnie put down the pump to answer the phone.  It was his little brother.

"I don't know what the hell's going on,' said Mary Macauley, "but
there's a plane down.  You better get all the boys out."

That was one of the good things about life in the military.  In what one
of their colleagues, with a wink, called an "extraordinary coincidence,"
Arnie had spent the past ten years on postings with his brother.  In
Greenwood, their two families lived a block apart.

Five years Arnie's junior, Mary was the more explosive of the two, and
even bigger, with a thick mustache and a six-acre voice.  Despite his
bluster, though, he felt perpetually in Arnie's shadow.  Arnie was
golden.  Arnie had so much ability that Mary never felt he was even
playing on the same field.  Mary was under a hockey suspension for his
habit of losing his temper and dropping the gloves.  Arnie was more the
type to take the cheap shot without retaliation, then score while the
other guy was in the penalty box .

Mary held Arnie up as a standard.  Which is probably why he had followed
his older brother through Air Cadets and basic training into rescue
work.

A pilot, Mary had risen to the rank of major-he outranked his older
brother-and was flight leader for the Hercules aircraft out of
Greenwood.  Arnie led the SARtechs; Mary led the sARhirds; they worked
under the same commanding officer.  They were a good team.  Indeed, they
had won national exercises, proving they were the best team in the
country.  They'd proved themselves to the world, but Mary had yet to
prove himself to himself-to cease seeing himself as Arnie's little
brother.

At that moment, Mary felt he'd been at the centre of a monumental
screw-up yet again.  The base operations officer in Greenwood had
telephoned him with breathless news about a big plane crash and asked
him to hold while he was patched through to the rescue centre in
Halifax.  The officer didn't stay on the connection, and the line went
dead.

Mary had tried a WATS line, but it was busy.  He nearly drove a thick
finger through the telephone dial, raising the Greenwood air base
telephone operator.  The operator didn't have the number for the Halifax
rescue centre.  Mary had wondered aloud, employing several Saxon
euphemisms, why this was so.

He slammed down the receiver, then called Arnie, then raised the duty
officer again.  Finally, he got through to Halifax and learned the scant
details: Hercules down near Alert, eighteen souls on board.  Mary told
the duty officer he wanted a hundred extra flares on the stand-by Here,
pronto, and an uplift of 63,000 pounds of fuel.  One hundred flares
weigh 2,500 pounds.  With the additional fuel, Mary's Hercules would be
4,000 pounds over maximum allowable weight at takeoff.

"You'll need Air Transport Group Headquarters to approve that," he was
told.

"Screw Headquarters," Mary replied ." Those are peacetime rules."

The idea of air rescue was conceived by Canada's legendary flying ace of
World War I and pioneering bush pilot, W.R.  "Wop" May.  In 1944, May
was manager of the Number Two Airserver School in Edmonton.  He was
concerned by the number of aviators who became stranded in the northern
wilderness.  All too often, a machine or human failure in the bush meant
the pilot was lost for all time.

"The only way to give downed survivors a chance in this terrain, so far
from roads and railway, is to drop medical men by parachute to patch' em
up," May said .

"Then teach them how to survive until they can walk out or we can get in
by dog sled."

The call went out for volunteers who not only were in good physical
condition and knowledgeable about bush lore, but also were
"temperamentally stable." Stability remains the most important quality
in the trade.  Recruits cannot enlist directly in search and rescue;
SARtechs are drawn from the other services.  Few enter the trade before
their late twenties; few practise after their mid-forties .

Great mental and physical resilience is required, and in most people
these years offer the best blend of maturity and youth.

For many years, theirs had not even been a "trade,' or occupation, in
the Canadian Armed Forces.  It was merely a "specialty' that borrowed
its rescuers from other ranks: usually parachutists, medics, or
explosives experts.  Often they were drawn from the ranks of parachute
folders.  The reasoning was that they could fold their own chutes,
saving the military money.

Arnie Macauley lived on the Greenwood air base with his wife, Darlene,
two children, and a beagle named Star .

On his bookshelf, he carried reminders of his former life, including a
small statuette of an airborne commando .

Around it were the insignia and symbols of the fighting trades, all
hairy forearms and winged daggers.  Arnie had sickened of that work;
indeed, like many SARtechs, he had tired of the military altogether.  He
had been conditioned to a mental and physical prime, had been trained at
great expense to jump from the sky, climb mountains, swim under
water-all to the purpose of killing someone.  Even if there were honour
in arms, he knew that his life would be wasted on exercises; that he
would, in all likelihood, spend his days playing soldier.

Then he had heard of a little-known trade in the forces that took the
same energy and training as an elite paracommando, which he was, but put
it to work saving lives .

It was an operational detail-he'd be called to do real work.  He thought
it would be better for his mental health .

He signed up and became a SARtech, as did his little brother.

Over the years the Macauley brothers had learned about the country in a
way few Canadians ever do, even those within the Armed Forces.  Canada,
to them, was a vast and splendid land.  They knew little about its
cities and less about its neuroses.  It was not the mind of Canada that
they admired but its magnificent body.

To Arnie, the country began with a blue coast of high timbers that would
catch him in its limbs as he fell from the sky.  There, you always
jumped with the coiled rope on your thigh and let yourself down gently
to the forest floor .

Then the high mountains, where the air was thin and you landed hard.
Arnie knew the alpine snows, could read the course of a season in them
and predict their intentions.  He was an avalanche and survival expert;
his skills were demanded around the world.  The Canadian Rockies had
been his teacher.

Then there was the northern bush, measureless and deep, and marshland,
and tundra, each with its own lore .

Arnie had been with Fred Ritchie then, and their friendship grew in the
north country.  They had foraged in the wild, as they foraged in the
supply depot.  Ritchie told him of how the northern bush tore up
parachutes, and of how, in the old days, he had been forced to scavenge
time-expired canopies from the U.S.  military.  They had cut steering
holes in them and operated the vents with nylon cord and toggles cut
from branches.  You can jump on a torn chute, Ritchie taught him, but
the crown must be intact; that's the high pressure area.

"You can do anything you like as a SARtech,' Ritchie had said, "just so
long as it doesn't cost the Canadian taxpayer any money."

Macauley had been to Ottawa once to be presented to the Governor
General.  They played a fanfare on the trumpet and gave him the Medal of
Bravery, which now hangs in his dining room.  He has no use for the city
otherwise.  To him, it is a place where few airplanes crash .

It is to the south of the northern Ontario bush.  It is a place where
the elected go to become incomprehensible.  He watches the news from
Ottawa at night and admits to feeling like the "Peanuts" character Lucy.
The teacher is saying "Waa waah waaah wah," and Lucy has no idea what
she means.

After Ottawa, though, you get into northern Quebec and Labrador; and
they are rugged.  To Arnie, the Great Canadian Shield is not dimly
remembered from geography class; it is hard rock to fall upon, difficult
terrain to hump across.  And then there are the Maritimes, composed of
tiny boats upon heavy seas, always in miserable weather.  And high
winds.  Atlantic Canada is, for Arnie, an adversary made of wind.

The trade seldom lost its people, except to injury or, in one case, to
suicide.  Arnie had always been aggressive; the SARtech life also made
him tranquil.  His job allowed him the outdoor life, and he fished
streams known only to anglers who arrived in orange jumpsuits from the
skies.  He had never known of a criminal or disciplinary problem among
his detachment.  There was a rare camaraderie.  His men-all SARtechs are
men; although the trade is open to women, none has yet passed the
course-were like a clan to him.  They weren't just his men.  They were
also his buddies.

Details of the crash were sketchy because the rescue coordination centre
in Edmonton was, in the first hours, as overloaded and jangled by shock
as Bob Thomson's spinal column.  Some things went more smoothly than
others.  It took only one hour and twenty-five minutes to set up a
network of notifying the next-of-kin and assigning officers to assist
the families.  At the same time, word had been received from Alert that
a Greenland Air Bell 212 helicopter had been launched from Thule and was
on its way to the crash site.  But a Bell 212 would never make it.  It
didn't have the range, and it couldn't be refueled in the air.

In the Edmonton control room, everyone was busy, everyone had a job to
do.  A wall chart was being completed, listing all resources in North
America that could be called to the task.  Someone was talking to Scott
Air Force base in Illinois, trying to determine if there were U.S.
helicopters in Thule, or anywhere else in the Arctic.  Others were on
the line, raising the Macauley SARteChs and ordering a Labrador
helicopter launch from Gander, Newfoundland.  A second Lab was requested
from Trenton, a third from Greenwood.

The last word from the circling Box Top flight near Alert was of "slim"
chances of survivors.

Amid all the energy and slackening confusion, Captain Wayne Todd noticed
something else.  People weren't quite looking at one another.  Everybody
was engaged in their own tasks; when they spoke to others, they tended
to keep their heads down, avoid eye contact.  Everyone in the room had
personal knowledge of at least one person on board .

Some had good friends on Box Top 22.

Then the bad news started coming back.  It was taken quietly.  The
Labrador helicopter launched from Greenwood hadn't even been able to
make it over the Gulf of St. Lawrence, because of closing weather, and
had been stood down.  That aircraft was struck off the wall chart.  A
helicopter from Goose Bay had also been stood down-the distance was too
great.  The rescue effort seemed to be falling apart before it had even
begun.

In Greenwood, meanwhile, Mary Macauley was getting annoyed.  He'd
hurried over to the operations centre to pick up the briefing fax from
Halifax.  The fax hadn't arrived; he had no brief.  His information was
limited to a rough latitude and longitude of the crash site.  Then he
found out that the extra flares hadn't been loaded, because no one could
find the duty armourers.  Why weren't things happening faster?

In fact, the SARtech departure from Greenwood was moving along smoothly.
The rescue squadron had been on two-hour stand-by, meaning a state of
readiness requiring two hours to launch.  Within eighty minutes of
getting the original call-out, Mary and Arnie would be airborne in the
Greenwood Hercules, Mary on the flight deck with the rest of the crew,
Arnie in back with the rest of the SARtechs and the flares.

Mary may have stepped on a few toes, but he wanted to get to Alert as
quickly as possible, with every resource at hand.  He didn't yet know
where he fit into the organization of the rescue effort.  He didn't even
know which rescue centre had command and control of his aircraft.  He
didn't know the weather at Alert, and he had only a rough idea of what
he'd do when he arrived.

But he knew he had to get up there, and fast.  He knew John Couch, had
taught him tactical airlift, instructing him in such difficult maneuvers
as flying a mere five feet off the ground.  As for Paul West, Mary had
flown rescue missions with the guy.  So had Arnie.  You don't share
those kinds of experiences without becoming good buddies.

Shelter for the Mind

Master Corporal David Meace sat on a green duffel bag, trying to make
sense of the past few hours.  It was hopeless.  He could remember
certain things and even comprehend them; but his comprehension did not
stir him to action.  He was recovering from adrenaline shock, his brain
sugars were depleted, and he knew he should move about or the shock
could kill him; but he did not move .

Even more than sinking into unconsciousness, he was afraid he might
wander away into the night.

Meace remembered there had been a bang and the lights had gone out.  He
remembered reaching across the bench seat to brace himself, and his arm
crossing the chest of Captain de Groot.  His hand had clutched at some
webbing; he remembered it had burned into his palm.

When he'd regained consciousness, he'd found himself lying in the snow
under some wreckage.  He hadn't moved at first; instead he looked up at
the sky.  There were stars out, and the moon looked much larger than it
would at home in Montreal, or at the base in Kingston.  It was a
halfmoon, as pregnant as it got in the fall, and there was something
else reminding him of autumn-an orange, flickering firelight.  He turned
his head and saw flames billowing from the airplane's remaining
sections, swirling upwards and disappearing in the darkness.

He noticed he was absolutely calm.  He stood up and began speaking to
himself: "Well, you can stand up.  Your back hurts a little, but not too
bad.  You'd better walk around."

He stumbled over to the overturned wing and stood there awhile.  His
lungs had been scared by fire, and he tired instantly.

He had seen Bill Vance in flames, and Wilma de Groot rolling him in the
snow.  Then de Groot went away, and another figure pulled himself from
the wreckage and began to crawl over to Vance's side.  It was Vance's
friend Mario Ellefsen.

Ellefsen had come to his senses and, upon realizing he was still alive,
had kissed his wedding band.  He then heard Vance calling for help.
Although his hips were broken, he dragged himself along on his forearms.

Couch ran past him towards the fuselage, where someone else was calling
out for help.  Couch stopped briefly at Ellefsen: "You all right?"

"What happened?" asked Ellefsen.

"I don't know," said Couch, then ran towards the fires to rescue the two
passengers caught in the fuselage wiring.

Meace had seen all this activity, and it had vaguely dawned on him that
he was merely standing around .

Everybody's doing something, he told himself.  You'd better do
something.  He went over to Ellefsen and Vance.

Vance was a mess.  Blood was flowing from his head .

The scalp had been lifted away like a toupee and had fallen back roughly
in place.  Blood was coursing down the blackened skin of his face.  His
eyelids had bloated to the size of charcoal briquettes, charred black
and greased with blood.  The lids were nearly swollen shut.

Vance could make out a pair of feet stumbling towards him through the
snow; then Meace was kneeling beside him and whispering in his ear ."
Stay with us, buddy, stay with us."

One of the aircrew came by with sleeping bags.  Meace knew it was a
member of the aircrew, because they stood

apart in their light blue flight suits.  He dropped four of the bags and
briefly examined Vance ." You'd better get him into a bag," he told
Meace.

Meace picked up a bag.  It was a thick Arctic bag, downfilled, with no
zipper.  A person had to crawl inside, and Vance could not move.
Instead, Meace draped the bag carefully over him, tucking the sides
against the snow.

The crewman returned and looked appraisingly at Vance and Ellefsen ."
We'd better get them both inside." So Meace and the crewman had
struggled to get the men into the sleeping bags.  It felt good to be
working; it gave Meace purpose.  When the job was done, the crewman
left.  Meace felt himself slipping back into shock.  He wanted to wander
away.  He didn't know where he would go.  He just wanted to go
somewhere.

Instead, he dragged a duffel bag between the two men .

Then he announced: "Jesus, I can't stand any more." And sat down.

Ellefsen wondered what he meant by that; whether he couldn't stand any
more in his body or in his mind.  Meace meant both.  His back felt
painfully swollen; he wondered why he had not felt the pain before.

Ellefsen was talking to the blinded Vance, an endless recording of the
same text: 'I'm here, Bill.  Are you still here?  Buddy, are you still
with me?  I'm here, Bill.  Are you still here?"

Meace didn't say anything.  He felt he would be intruding on their
conversation.  He sat in silence until Paul West came over to their
group.

"I'm goddamn freezing," Meace said ." Is it safe to go by that fire over
there?"

He pointed at the wing.  It had flipped over in the crash, and the
underside-which was now on top-had been ripped away, exposing its
reinforcing ribs.  The leading edge curled upwards, providing a wall of
sorts.  A fire was burning between the ribs.  Altogether, it looked like
shelter.

From his years on rescue aircraft, West knew that a psychological
shelter was nearly as good as the real thing .

The wing would provide scant protection from the cold .

But it would provide a sense of home for the mind, and that would
enhance the passengers' will to survive.

" Sure," he said.

The slow procession to the wing began.  Most of the survivors were
scattered nearby.  Some could walk.  Others were carried in their
sleeping bags or dragged with their arms around the shoulders of the
flight crew.

David Meace, being in fairly good shape and wanting something to do, was
put in charge of preparing fuel to keep the wing fire burning.  The
flight crew brought him anything that would burn-webbing, the aircraft
log, the operating manual, technical orders, paperbacks.  He tore the
pages from the spine and crumpled them.  Then Michael Moore, the
navigator, added them to the fire.

Moore was in charge of the fire, and it was tiresome work.  The ruptured
fuel bladder was about fifty yards away and still contained a few dozen
gallons of diesel.  But there was no suitable container to transport the
fuel to the fire.  After a search, he found a piece of wreckage in the
shape of a cup.  He and West carried the diesel, a few ounces at a time,
back to the wing.

It was a journey of one hundred paces for eight ounces of fuel.  The icy
crust sometimes broke underfoot and stabbed at their shins.  They
struggled to keep their balance and tried not to spill the precious
fuel.  From time to time, they would break through the crust, falling
over onto their knees or face.  The diesel would spill onto the snow,
and they would go back and try again.  Barely had they added fuel to the
fire when it was time for the next trip.  They wore thick, absorbent
gloves of wool or felt; soaked with diesel, the gloves weighed several
pounds.  The diesel parched their frozen skin, and their hands were soon
cracked and raw.  But still they carried the fuel.

Wilma de Groot sat by the fire, with Vance's charred head in her lap.
She asked West how long it would be until they were rescued.

"We're only about ten miles from the station,' he said .

"Help is on the way.  I'd say we should be out of here within, maybe, an
hour or two."

Why, then, Wilma wondered, had the crew not stopped to rest?  Why, if
they'd be rescued in an hour or two, were they still striking off to
gather up duffel bags and other potentially usable things?  And though
Paul West had sounded optimistic, why, she wondered, had his perfect
precision suddenly failed him?

With Bob Thomson, Couch knew, there was no decision to make.  The man
had a broken back, as well as other fractures and possible internal
injuries.  His legs were grotesquely arranged.  He simply could not be
moved.

Sue Hillier was more difficult to diagnose.  Couch had asked her many
times how she felt, and at first she had said, 'I don't know, I can't
feel anything." But she had also complained of pain all over.  He had
tried to move her; twice, in fact, he had placed his arms under her
shoulders and attempted to lift her to her feet.  Each time she had
fainted, and the deep lacerations on her thigh and buttocks had started
to bleed.  So he had left her there.

Despite Sue's injuries-both her legs were broken and badly burned, her
right shoulder and elbow were broken, several ribs were broken, and she
was hemorrhaging internally-her mind remained remarkably clear and
active.  Each time she woke from her faint, she fixed Couch with those
penetrating eyes and asked questions.  She wanted to know everything.
What happened?  Why had they crashed?  Where were they?  When would they
be rescued?

Couch let her talk.  There was time enough for knowing.  When she
finally lapsed into silence, he told her he'd be back and walked over to
Wilma de Groot, who was sitting inside the wing with the blinded
soldier's head on her lap.

"I need your opinion, Wilma." His face was pained and grave ." I don't
think it's safe to move those two.  Think we should leave them outside?"

At first, Wilma didn't understand ." You mean we can?"

Couch nodded.

"Then of course.  If you can leave them where they are, it's much safer.
Even if their spines aren't broken, you could cause spinal shock by
moving them."

Couch did not appear convinced.

"They could die, John."

It seemed to be what he'd needed to hear.  He returned to Sue's side,
kneeling and speaking softly.  'We're going to have to leave you here
with Bob.  I'm sorry.  But if you have a broken neck, any movement could
kill you."

Buried deep in each heart is a great idiosyncratic fear, an irrational
dread of something most other people accept with equanimity.  Sue's
great fear was of abandonment, a fear she had transmuted into a love of
company.  At home, she was always surrounded by other people, hardly
giving herself a solitary moment.  She had become a hairdresser for the
same reason, to ensure community, a constant human context.  It was
clear that this baking man cared for her, and she tried desperately to
control her anxiety.

She did not know who the man was, only that his name was John and that
he appeared to be in charge and that the cold was starting to get to
him.  He was wearing nothing more than his polycotton flight suit and a
cotton jacket-not even a hat-and his speech had become affected by the
cold.  His tone remained quietly authoritative but the words had lost
their crispness, running together in a numbed bumble.

"Where are you going?"

"The others are over at the wing.  We'll make a fire here for you. We're
going to make you as comfortable as we can."

"No," she said ." Where are you going?"

"I'm not going anywhere.  I give you my word.  I'll stay with you as
long as I can." He added, in a voice suddenly emotional, "I won't leave
you, Sue."

Now the roles had changed; Sue realized that he was distraught.  She had
not meant to upset him ." It's okay.  I believe you."

Couch and Joe Bales began the slow work of building a shelter from the
depth hoar surrounding the maimed bodies of Sue Hillier and Bob Thomson.
Six inches of packed fresh snow, of the sort found hundreds of miles to
the south and used in the building of igloos, has an insulation value Of
R-70, about the same as most homes.  A resting body throws off the same
amount of heat as a burning candle and can warm a shelter built of such
snow to a temperature of one or two degrees above freezing.

Here, though, this close to the North Pole, the snow was dry and
granular, almost useless as insulation and impossible to carve into snow
blocks.  The depth hoar around Sue and Bob had a tiny fraction of good
snow's insulating value, and the permafrost beneath them was as cold as
the ambient temperature.  The primary value of the cave that Couch and
Bales made for them was as a shelter from the wind.

Seven sleeping bags had been recovered, and the flight crew used four of
them in sheltering Sue and Bob.  First, they dug as much snow as
possible away from their bodies and shoved a sleeping bag underneath.
Then they packed snow between Sue's legs, covered her body with another
bag, and piled snow on top of that.  From the chest down, she was
immobilized.  They coiled a rag over her face, leaving her mouth clear.
The rag was noxiously soaked with diesel fuel, but she found it warmer
than having her face exposed.  Sue, the woman who loved company, felt as
alone as a mummy.

Bob was more difficult to cover because of the awkward skew of his legs.
His left foot was still up behind his head, his right cranked outwards
and exposed.  Someone found a curled piece of torn fuselage and drove it
into the snow, creating a windbreak. Bob's face was canopied with a
piece of canvas tarpaulin.  It was completely dark inside this
structure, and Bob was still nearly insensate from shock.  He was slowly
pulled to awareness by the irritation of down feathers being drawn into
his mouth and nostrils .

The bag had torn and he began worrying his tongue over his lips, wetting
the down, trying to keep his breathing clear.

"Box TopTwo One, this is PaulWest.  Do you read me?

Over."

Static.

"Try another channel.,

Bob Thomson gradually came back to his senses in a blur of sound and
blackness.  The drone of an aircraft overhead was mixed up with the
sound of radio static.

" Box Top Two One, do you read me?  Over."

"Try the flares."

When the sharp report of three flares fired at close range registered in
Bob, his nervous system could not handle the shock.  The crack of the
flares made him feel as though he were at the centre of a huge
concussion.  His body began to shake, and the image went through his
mind of a sparrow quivering on the ground, having struck a pane of
glass.

Your nerves are shot, Thomson.

The fingers of his right hand were close to his cheek, and they trembled
over his skin.  He wrestled to bring the hand under control.  He heard
voices again.

"They've seen us!  It's only ten miles.  They'll be here soon!  "

Hear that, Thomson?  Ten miles.  You can hold out for a couple of hours.

Bob focused on the uncontrollable quaking, trying to settle his body. As
he concentrated, he noticed he was not trembling from the waist down. He
was nothing from the waist down.  He was paralyzed.  It was something he
could no longer deny, but he could put off thinking about it.

"How are you?" a voice asked.

"Okay," he said.  'A lot of pain."

"We're building you a fire."

He began to orient himself.  Another voice was off to his right, a
woman's voice-Sue's.  It seemed as though his head was near her feet.
She was going through a period of hysteria, the words impeded by the
lacerated tongue that had swollen in her mouth: "Oh God oh Jesus how did
this happen?  Oh my Jesus oh God."

He let her ramble for a while.  He begrudged her none of the words; he
felt much the same way.

"It's okay, Susan.  Hang in there."

Bob found it difficult to speak loudly, but even these few, barely
audible words had an immediate effect.

"Bob?"

"I'm here."

Sue was not alone after all.  She began to pepper him with questions.
What did he know?  What kind of shape was he in?  How was his snow cave
compared with hers?

Could he see anything?  When Bob described his injuries that he had no
feeling below the waist, that one foot seemed to be up behind his head,
and that his buttocks seemed impaled on a piece of metal-Sue felt faint.

Then, to her surprise, the swoon yielded to a surge of purposefulness.
She began to worry about him.  She tried to engage him in talk about his
life, but he fell suddenly unresponsive.  Sue cast about for a common
topic of concern.  She settled on the fire.

Paul West had brought over a fire in a pot-shaped piece of metal and
placed it in the crook between them.  Bales and Couch were combing the
snow for pieces of material to soak in diesel fuel and bring to the
fire.  It was throwing more light than heat to Bob, who watched the
flickering light on his diesel-soaked tarpaulin and suddenly realized
that a spark would carry over and ignite the canvas over his face.

"It's nice, guys," Thomson said, spitting down feathers from his mouth,
when he heard the crew return ." But a lot of work for not much return."

"I'm burning on one side," Sue said ." I'm freezing on one side and
burning on the other."

The crew agreed to let the fire die down.  The darkness grew even
darker.  Sue felt the falling temperature and deeper darkness and
associated it with nightfall.

"Well, Bob," she said as cheerily as she could, fighting her ungainly
tongue, "we're in for a cold night, but it'll warm up at dawn."

" Dawn," Bob said hopelessly ." There's no dawn."

"It'll warm up," said Sue.

"There's no dawn.  There's no dawn until spring."

Mike Moore was stoking the fire at the overturned wing.  Here, at least,
there was some semblance of shelter and kinship.  The survivors all felt
they had seen the worst; their fortunes were on the rise.  They could
hear the aircraft overhead, knew they were mere miles from the station .

Intent on these hopeful signs, they had not really noticed the slow
creep of the wind, the stars being extinguished one by one, the gradual
fall in temperature.

Few of the survivors knew one another, and fewer could have recognized
one another even if they did.  Their faces were smeared with blood,
diesel, and charcoal.  Most of the passengers had parkas, which were
also filthy and wet.  Their feet and hands were covered with an
assortment of boots and gloves, mostly torn, all of them fuel-soaked .

They had started to shiver with the cold, and their injured bodies had
become stiff.

Vance, blinded with second-degree burns to his face, had been wrapped in
a sleeping bag and was resting his head on de Groot's lap.  Ellefsen,
with a broken pelvis that ground audibly when he moved, had been placed
along the wing in his sleeping bag.  Beside him was Master Corporal
David Montgomery, who had lacerations to his scalp and left arm and a
skull fracture that had left him drifting in and out of consciousness,
rambling and incoherent.

The other injuries, while painful and gory, were not immediately
life-threatening.  Captain Richard Dumoulin had smashed the orbital bone
around his right eye.  His friend Master Warrant Officer Mare Tremblay,
who'd suffered lower back injuries, did not tell him how bad he looked,
even though the sight of Dumoulin's face turned his stomach .

Master Corporal Tony Cobden was equally grisly, with a massively swollen
bruise around his right eye and a long laceration in his scalp.
Virtually everybody, including the flight crew, had deeply bruised and
swollen backs.

The flight crew all had damage to their backs.  West, perhaps the most
energetic of them all, had slipped off his shoulder harness just before
the crash.  In addition to a bruised back, he had bruised his knees and
shoulders.  This was bruising of such severe nature that it caused
several passengers to think their backs were broken.  The flight crew
worked despite the pain.  Although they had the least useful clothing,
they stayed warm by movement.  Their bruising did not stiffen, and they
did not feel the cold, because they remained active.  They burned
calories-their bodies were throwing off twice the heat of those on the
wing-and they worked up a sweat.  This would exact a terrible price
later; but for the moment, they were in good shape.  Besides, they felt
sure of imminent rescue.

Because of Canada's size and climate, the Canadian Forces have developed
a body of knowledge about survival rivaled nowhere else in NATO.
Although none of the flight crew had completed the rigorous Arctic
winter survival course in the Northwest Territories, all had learned the
basic principles of survival in flight crew training.

Canada differs from its European NATO partners in its approach to
survival.  In Europe, crews are taught to be aggressive; the Canadian
approach is passive.  Downed over Europe, a flight crew stands a better
chance of reaching safety than it would in the Canadian wilderness .

Canadian crews are taught to wait at the crash site.  The European model
also emphasizes bush lore and skills; the Canadian model recognizes that
nature is an impossible adversary.  It teaches some lore but recognizes
that the most important survival skill is mental resilience.

Cold is a physical reaction to the elements, but also a psychological
one.  Fire and shelter create physical warmth but are of far greater
importance to the mind.  Of the four benefits of a fire, only one is
physical: the provision of warmth and the control of mild shock.  The
other benefits are psychological.  Fire acts as a signal, giving
reassurance to survivors that the crash site can be found.  Building a
fire provides first a goal and then a feeling of accomplishment .

Fire also provides a sense of well-being.  In controlled experiments,
the sight of a fire has raised the body temperature of subjects even
when the fire provides no warmth .

Although the Hercules survivors' small fire, burning between the metal
ribs of the overturned wing, provided not a single calorie of warmth to
the survivors, West and Moore knew it was well worth the effort of
sustaining it.

Fire also helps to overcome psychological cold, a term for the physical
reaction to a mental attitude.  Flight crews are taught that virtually
everyone in a survival situation feels guilt-either for the blunders
that got them into the mess or for the efforts being made to rescue
them.  But shame, along with fear, anxiety, and pessimism, can kill .

These emotions contribute to shock.  They cause perspiration, which
leaches heat and later freezes.  They dilate the blood vessels, bringing
more blood to the surface of the skin and increasing heat loss.  The
best way of overcoming psychological cold is to set goals that
contribute to the chance of rescue.  For their own sakes, then, as well
as for the benefit of the passengers, the flight crew knew the
importance of keeping the fire alive.

It was working; the survivors were settling into something approaching a
routine.  The flight crew were busy, and the able passengers all had
some chore to occupy them on the wing.  Wilma comforted the blinded
Vance.  Meace tore apart the flight logs as fuel for the fire.  Dumoulin
opened the green duffel bags brought to him by West.

The duffel bags containing the lifesaving equipment on board the
aircraft had been stored high along the right side of the fuselage, an
area completely destroyed in the crash .

They were green Defense-issue bags, and although some had a strip of
orange fluorescent tape on one side, so did many of the passengers'
duffel bags.  As West searched the crash for useful items, he had no way
to tell whether a duffel bag contained a fuel stove, for example, or
some of Bob Thomson's CANEX stereos.  He simply hauled everything back
to the wing, where Dumoulin, his eye grotesquely displaced, pried the
frozen zipper free.

This process took on the expectation and surprise of a Christmas
morning.  The other passengers watched eagerly as Dumoulin reached
inside each duffel bag.  Once, he pulled out several tubes of mosquito
repellent.  He held them high, and they drew a laugh from the survivors,
at the expense of the Canadian military.  He also found useful items,
such as a Swiss army knife.  But he put it in a pocket of his parka for
safekeeping.  He had not noticed the pocket was torn, and the
knife-along with his Arctic mitts-was lost in the grimy snow.

It was a small mistake, just as the flight crews' working hard enough to
perspire was a small mistake.  The Arctic seldom kills by big mistakes.

Dumoulin was delighted with one discovery-three packages of survival
candies.  The candies were flavoured gelatin cubes, cling-wrapped in
clear plastic.  They had frozen solid.

"Here, Doc,' he said ." You better take these."

Wilma read the instructions on the candywrapper .

Each package provided enough calories for one person for two days.  That
was six person-days.  We are fourteen.  We have enough sustenance for
twelve hours each.  She would ration them accordingly.

The survivors had purpose, the expectation of a quick rescue, and a
degree of comfort.  The initial shock had worn off, they had reconciled
themselves to their various injuries, and they had taken an interest in
their surroundings .

Although they were beginning to register the terrible cold physically,
they had mental warmth and security.

They even ventured into ribald humour.  Wilma, with Vance's head in her
lap, reached down into his sleeping bag to warm her hands.

" Look out, Bill.  Doc's taking advantage of you."

"Hey, Doc, is that first aid?"

" Sure, Doc, the old 'my hands are cold' routine."

"You guys are just jealous," she said ." Aren't they, Bill?"

Vance forced a chuckle-a good sign, she thought.  If we can keep our
spirits up, maybe we can ignore that the weather is getting worse.  She
shivered, tucking herself more closely around Vance.

Moore was bringing a new container of fuel to the fire .

Wilma had never seen his face, which had been covered since the crash by
a wool-and-polyester knit balaclava.  She was surprised when she first
heard his voice.  Why, she thought, he's just a baby.

Moore leaned down, bending close to the fire, and began adding the new
container of fuel.  The scene was abruptly fixed in time, as if caught
in a strobe light.  There was a whoosh, a blinding flash, and then a
fireball erupted from the blaze, lighting the darkness and racing the
length of the wing.  Wilma curled over, covering Vance's face with her
chest and tucking her own head.

Dumoulin and Tremblay were blown over backwards; the fireball had struck
Dumoulin in the face, singeing his hair and flesh.  In the ensuing
panic-screams, incoherent shouts, bodies scrambling away on hands and
kneesWilma looked up and saw Mike Moore lurching away, his head in
flames, screaming.  He collapsed to his knees, burying his face in the
snow, then fell motionless.

"The bag!" Dumoulin shouted ." Get the bag off him!' Bill Vance's
sleeping bag was highly flammable, and flames were creeping up the
cotton cover.  She beat at the flames with her hands, while someone
yanked at the foot of the bag, tugging it off and throwing it away.  It
landed on Tremblay, who rolled it in the snow.

Then shocked silence.  What had caused the fireball?  The Hercules
NATO-standard jp-40 fuel, an explosive blend of kerosene and diesel.
Perhaps Moore had unwittingly scooped up aviation fuel rather than the
slower-burning diesel.  Perhaps a pocket of fuel in the wing structure
had heated up beneath the fire, rupturing at the moment that Moore
leaned forward .

That would explain the force of the fireball.  Whatever the cause, Moore
now had second-degree burns to his face, and the number of useful flight
crew had been reduced to three.

Wilma suddenly felt her husband looking for her, probing her.  He had
found her, and she felt his anxious telepathic questioning.  No, George!
She fairly screamed the words in her mind.  No!  She had never cut him
off before, but now she slammed steel doors around her thoughts.  Go
away!  I don't want you.  Go away now!

It seemed to have worked.  She felt his confusion, then sensed him
drawing away.

Wilma limped over to Paul West, to ask what should be done next.  West
was switching on an emergency locator beacon.

"You don't leave that turned on all the time?"

"Can't.  We're out of flares.  This is all we have left.  The batteries
only last twenty-four hours.  Batteries are no damn good up here
anyway."

Wilma digested this information.  It was the first concrete indication
she had that rescue might not be imminent.

The fireball had left the survivors shocked and demoralized.  They had
lost their precarious and hard-won sense of shelter and safety.  Now, as
she struggled back to her place, feeling the cold invade her body and
trying to keep the weight off her broken ankle and wondering again if
her back was broken, a gust of wind drove ice spicules into her face.
They were as painful as tiny needles at first, then seemed to numb her
flesh.  The wind was picking up and the temperature was falling.

All at once, everyone became acutely aware of the gradually worsening
weather.

Settling herself, cradling Vance's head in her lap, Wilma realized that
the fireball had cost them more than their shelter.  Like West's
abruptness, and like her own rejection of George's attempts at psychic
connection, it had marked, at some deep level, the beginning of the
death of hope.

Operation Arctic Storm

Corporal Steven Cann, a man of simple tastes, would soon be leaving his
six-month tour of Alert behind him.  He had found his time at the polar
station interesting, but long .

When he got home, the six-month-old baby girl he'd left behind in
Edmonton would be celebrating her first birthday.  He thought of writing
her.  Emily.  Or was it Emilie?  He could never remember.

Cann was a mechanic.  In the armed services, he's called a "vehicle
technician." He might be asked to work on anything from a motorcycle to
a ten-ton crane.  It didn't matter to him.  He made things go.  At
Alert, he shared a barracks with other mechanics, and their barracks had
a reputation .

It was called the Monster House.

Cann had knocked off his shift and ambled into the cafeteria and was
just sitting down to an early-evening meal when a buddy from Monster
House came through the doors double-time, spotted him, and waved him
over.

"Get back to the shack.  We'll be in touch with you." 'What's up?"

"There's a Herc down.  I'm rounding up service techs for a ground
party."

Cann bustled back to his barracks and waited.  He didn't bother to take
off his parka.  He hadn't even finished his meal, but he was no longer
hungry.  The other mechanics assembled, with instructions to prepare all
vehicles for a ground search party.  They stepped outside to the vehicle
shed, stamping their feet to keep warm while they topped up fluids,
checked track, and warmed crankcase oil.

The station had nine vehicles capable of mounting a search for the
downed Hercules.  Two of them were Red Devils, halftracked vehicles with
enclosed cabins.  They resembled pick-up trucks with two wheels forward
and tracks under the box.  There were also seven Bombardier Go-Tracks,
fully tracked vehicles with enclosed cabins .

Four of the seven Go-Tracks belonged to the eight-cylinder 800 series,
three to the rather underpowered six-cylinder 300 series.  The fastest
and strongest were the 800 series, but even these had a top speed of
only about thirty miles per hour-and that, as Cann said, was "going
downhill with a stiffwind to your back."

The command post at Alert had decided the best chance of saving any
survivors rested with a quick dash overland, retrieval of the wounded,
and return to the station.  The estimate was that this could be
accomplished within seven hours, before any of the Hercules rescue
flights enroute from Edmonton and Greenwood had even arrived.

Twenty-four personnel were selected to go out, of whom half had some
first-aid or medical training.  The senior medical staff at the station
were a sergeant and a warrant officer trained as medical assistants;
they were known as "Major Duff" and "Minor Duff," the term "duff"
referring to a fake .

The station was not equipped for an overland rescue, and none of the
personnel were trained in rescue work.

Still, within two and a half hours, the vehicles were loaded with warm
clothing, sleeping bags, and first-aid kits.  The search party set off
in convoy into the darkness: the yellow Go-Tracks blazed trail, followed
by the Red Devils, followed in turn by a bulldozer.  The dozer was
hauling a stoneboat loaded with forty-five-gallon drums of diesel fuel.
Amid belching diesel and steam and mechanical noise and eerily lit
darkness, the departure was like the launch of an all-tracked rally
race.

The leaders of the convoy had a rough idea of the crash location,
transmitted from the Box Top flight that had spotted flames on the
ground.  The bearing was reliable, but the estimate of the distance was
optimistic.  They believed, mistakenly, that the crash was about five
miles away, and on their side of the most formidable obstacle in their
paththe Sheridan River gorge.

Steven Cann drove a Red Devil.  This is all wrong, he thought, as the
convoy made its way in the frigid darkness .

The medical staff were up front, in the Go-Tracks.  The mechanics
brought up the rear, in the Red Devils.  It was not that Cann wanted to
cover himself in glory by being the first to arrive at the scene.  But
what if the Go-Tracks broke down?  He had covered this terrain in the
summer months and knew how treacherous it was.  The broken shale could
slash the Kevlar-reinforced track tread, and loose shale rendered even a
gentle slope dangerously unstable.

The convoy headed due south along a route used in the summer months to
reach the twin peaks of Dean Hill and Mount Pullen, two prominent hills
visible from the station .

The night was clear, the winds were low, and the convoy was able to
follow the compacted foundation of a summer road.  There was a bridge
across the first creek they had to traverse, and they reached the hills
within an hour.  They expected to find the crash nearby.

Cann had never felt so pumped up in his life, but his spirits soon
flagged.  The lights of the convoy lit only the desolate landscape;
there was no sign of the wreckage.  The convoy pressed on, and within
minutes they hit a ravine, probably a tributary of the Sheridan.  It
fell steeply about forty feet, then climbed more moderately on the far
side.  The searchlights revealed that, although the prevailing winds had
compacted the snow on their side, it had left the shale exposed on the
other embankment.  It would be tricky going.

The Go-Tracks risked the crossing, sliding down the slope and climbing
up the far side.  The Red Devils were forced to stay behind.

What if they break down?  Cann thought.  What good are the vehicle techs
back here?

It was a mere two miles to the Sheridan River gorge, two miles beyond
that to the survivors.  The Go-Tracks made it nearly to the river's edge
before two of them broke down within a minute of each other.  One was no
longer charging its own batteries, which quickly lost power in the cold.
The other had an overheated differential.

Not that it mattered any more.  The Sheridan, the searchers realized,
was impassable, a sheer ravine of 240 feet.  They drove back and forth
along the embankment to find a crossing, but without success.  The
searchers got out of their vehicles to ponder and commiserate.  From
where they stood, cold and thwarted, they could see the orange light
from the burning wreckage of the Hercules glowing on the horizon.

Then came the problem of getting back to the station .

The convoy was itself in trouble and had to call back on the radio for
mechanical help.  The bulldozer paved the way, slipping over the edge of
the creek ravine, blazing a path .

Cann gingerly drove his Red Devil across the ravine with trepidation,
but without incident.

By then the stars were blinking out, and Cann noticed the wind was
rising.  He had imagined himself in heroic terms, bounding across the
snows on foot, bringing help to the survivors.  He realized soon enough
that it had been a foolish notion.  By the time he had repaired the
ailing GoTracks, fighting the numbing cold and darkness, a full Arctic
blizzard was brewing.

The convoy proceeded at full speed back towards the station, trying to
beat the storm.  Two of the Go-Tracks broke down again and had to be
abandoned.  The blizzard was now at their heels; by the time Cann
finally spotted the station lights at Alert, the conditions were
approaching white-out.  A button-up had been declared, meaning all
personnel had been locked inside and a rope perimeter bordered the
station.

Relieved to be back in the warmth and comfort of the station, Steven
Cann realized for the first time how torturously difficult it was going
to be to reach the survivors.  It struck him how easily the convoy could
have become lost, how quickly a heroic outing could have turned into a
second disaster.  For the first time since the adrenaline rush of
setting out, he felt scared.

At the rescue coordination centre in Edmonton, Smokey Blair took the
news of the failed ground party from Alert at about the same time that a
new weather forecast arrived.

just what I need, he thought.  Cannons to the left of me, cannons to the
right.  And now cannons in front of me.

An hour earlier, Box Top 2 I, circling the crash site, had seen the
three green flares Paul West had fired from the ground.  It was the
first confirmation of survivors from the crash.  It was news nobody had
even dared hope to receive .

When Blair had arrived at the rescue centre, he and Todd had cautioned
each other not to expect survivors.  When the bulletin had come in to
the contrary, Blair expected staff in the rescue centre to react with
whoops of joy.  But the news hadn't had that effect on the others, or on
himself.  It had merely tightened the knot in his gut.

With survivors on the ground, the rescue centre increasingly despaired
of reaching them in time.  It would be infinitely worse to have them die
in their hands, as it were, than in the crash itself.  But that tragic
outcome looked more inevitable with every hour.  The failure of the
ground party was a major defeat.  Especially when Blair read the sheet
of teletype in his hand:

To Blair, the coding drew a clear picture of a rising storm and closing
weather.  The amended forecast called for a ceiling of 1,000 feet, with
reduced visibility in blowing snow. The winds had picked up out of the
northwest, gusting to thirty knots. It was bad news all around: bad for
the parachute rescue team enroute to Alert, worse still for the
survivors on the ground.

Winds of thirty knots would push the real temperatures at the crash site
to less than -50 degrees Celsius.  That is some 70 degrees colder than
room temperature.  Christ, Blairthought, that was 130 degrees Fahrenheit
colder than the control room.  Poor bastards.

Such fierce cold was nearly inconceivable; without shelter, exposed skin
would freeze in less than thirty seconds.  Death by hypothermia would
follow in a matter of hours.  It was as though Blair were trying to
coordinate a rescue for a foundered submarine, with only hours of oxygen
remaining.  And the storm was not content merely to sap the remaining
heat from the survivors; it had to foul a rescue attempt as well.  No
one jumped out of an airplane into winds of thirty knots, period.  Let
alone at night.  Let alone over unknown terrain.  Not even SARtechs.

"They'll never get in, not with this weather," he said to Todd.

It wasn't like Blair to be this far down.  Todd put on his bravest grin:
"I think they'd jump without parachutes, Smokey, if we let 'em."

Right now they needed a helicopter at Alert, and badly .

If the SARtechs did manage to get into the crash site, they'd need a
helicopter to get them out.  If the SARtechs couldn't jump from the
Here, they'd need the helicopter to get them in.

When Blair called over a junior officer for a situation report on
helicopter resources, the news only added to his frustration.  There was
no word on the Bell 212 helicopter, which Blair was beginning to believe
was a mythical creation arising from some Nordic mist ." Launch at first
light," the last message from the Americans had read.  The North Pole,
October 30.  What light?

The Labrador helicopters were all dead in the water .

The Greenwood Lab hadn't lasted even an hour.  The Gander Lab had been
stood down in lqaluit as unserviceable .

The Lab from 424 Squadron in Trenton was still flying, but it was a pipe
dream to think a Labrador could hopscotch from southern Ontario to the
North Pole.  It was a mad caper even to launch.  He expected word of a
stand-down at any moment.

It seemed the best bet among Canadian resources was a plan to scrape the
belly of a Hercules from Edmonton's 435 Squadron and stuff a
stripped-down CH-135 Twin Huey helicopter into the cavity.  The Hercules
would carry the helicopter to Alert, where it could be re-assembled and
then flown to the crash site.  It was a time-consuming plan but appeared
to be the only realistic one.  Maintenance crews in Edmonton were
already at work tearing down the single-rotor Twin Huey.

"What's the situation report on Rescue Three One One?" Blair asked a
junior officer.

"Estimated time of departure with Huey on board at fifteen hundred Zulu,
sir," the officer said.

Blair needed a smoke.  He patted his pockets for some chewing gum.
Fifteen hundred Zulu was damn near ten hours away.

"Except I just contacted the squadron and I think the launch time is
optimistic, sir.  The flight crew for the Huey were in B.C.  on
exercise.  They're not even due back until seventeen hundred Zulu, sir."

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.  What about Elmendorf?"

He was referring to the large U.S.  air base at Anchorage, Alaska; the
U.S.  base at Thule had already reported that no helicopters were
available in Greenland.

"We've contacted Scott AFB and established a liaison to Elmendorf, sir.
They have two Pavehawks available, ready, and configured to SAR."

A glimmer of hope.  Blair raised his eyebrows: "When can they be on
site?"

"They have air-to-air refueling capability but no refuelers.  And they
won't risk them on a polar routing .

They'll have to fly south and around.  Scott estimates two days max
effort, sir."

Two days?  In a wind chill of -50 Celsius?  Those poor bastards.  Game
over.

Wednesday night was 'Wings Night' at Rumours in Trenton.  Rumours was
the sort of tavern that appeals to men in the Armed Forces, and Wings
Night was an inside joke among those at the Trenton air base who had
earned their own wings.  The place served chicken wings on Wednesdays.

The Wednesday night of October 30 found the Labrador pilots and flight
engineers of 424 Squadron deep in beer and conversation.  The evening of
camaraderie and routine bitching was well under way by eleven o'clock,
when a server came to the table to ask, 'Is there a Major Shyiak here?"

The squadron's flight commander was, indeed, present and accounted for.

"Telephone for you.  You can take it at the bar." Shyiak strolled over,
pursued by the expected ribbing.

What's her name, Major?  The expression on his face when he returned
stopped the wisecracks cold.

"Okay, boys," he said ." Don't drink up.  Go home.

There's a MAJAID, Hercules down at Alert.  We're launching SAR."

Like the others at the table, Captain Mark Levesque was dumbfounded at
the idea of launching a Labrador to the Pole.  He bent forward to hear
what Shyiak had to say next.  A Labrador helicopter had been on another
mission, at the end of a crew day, when the call-out came.  Levesque's
colleague, Captain Don Paul, bad been attempting a dash up the eastern
shore of James Bay and Hudson Bay.  But the weather had soured, and the
twin-rotor Labrador had been beaten back as far as Chibougamau, in
northern Quebec .

Paul was now trying to reach Wabush in Labrador.  He had already been
flying thirty-six hours, and his crew was reaching the point of
dangerous exhaustion.

The mission Shyiak outlined called for two complete flight crews to
deadhead, or fly as passengers, on board a Buffalo aircraft to Wabush.
There they would be joined by two teams of SARtechs and proceed to
Alert.  Flight crews at Trenton were to return home and await orders.
Any one of them could be tapped for the rescue mission, which had been
dubbed Operation Arctic Storm.

Levesque drove home convinced it would never happen.  The very name of
the mission had a dark irony.  It was every bit as audacious as the
military campaign in the Persian Gulf, but there the similarity ended.
The campaign against Iraq had been planned and executed with a high
likelihood of success.  The odds against the Labrador mission's success
were formidable.

For one thing, a Labrador had never made such a flight .

To his knowledge, a Lab had once flown as far north as Cornwallis
Island, about two-thirds the distance of this mission.  The flight had
taken three weeks, in the daylight months, as part of an expedition.  It
had support and a mobile repair party.  This mission called for an
unsupported flight of 3,600 miles.  There was-what?-maybe one serviced
airport over the whole flight plan.  It would take a Lab some forty
hours to cover the distance, and aged Labs simply did not fly forty
hours without breaking down.

For another, it would be night visual rules all the way .

The Labrador's navigational aids, although sophisticated, were useless
that far north.  The magnetic compass would be spinning in its socket.
The directional gyros had been unserviceable for northern flying for
years; someone in Ottawa was working on the problem, but the gyros could
not be trusted.  The other navigational aids did not work over long
distances, because the Labrador had a ceiling of about 10,000 feet and a
correspondingly reduced radio range.  They would be flying blind.  It
simply couldn't be done without a fixed-wing aircraft to provide
guidance from a higher altitude, known as top cover; and there hadn't
even been mention of top cover.

Levesque figured he'd end up losing a night's sleep over this.  He'd
probably fly halfway up there through crappy weather, then be turned
back with news that the Lab wasn't needed.  No, they'd realize how
misguided an idea it was.

Still, he went to bed with his flight suit folded at his side .

He could not sleep.  He could not help telling himself that no one had
flown to the North Pole in a helicopter, unaided, at night.  He wondered
if it could be done.  He wondered if he'd be the one to try.

At three in the morning, his phone rang.

"You're on," said the operations officer ." Departure in thirty
minutes."

Fifteen minutes past midnight in Edmonton, about ten hours after the
crash, a bulletin flashed through the rescue centre.  Smokey Blair had
trouble believing it.  According to the message, Fred Ritchie's group Of
SARtechs from Edmonton had landed.  How?  It was impossible to conceive
that they had jumped from the Hercules and reached the crash site by
parachute.

"Hate to say I told you so," Todd beamed.

"Just a damn minute," Blair said ." Get Alert on the radiophone.  I want
this confirmed."

But confirmation was slow in coming.  The rescue centre was unable to
raise Alert on the high-frequency radio and had to wait for the station
to call south on the land line.

If Ritchie's SARtechs were on site, they would need a helicopter to get
them out.  just one goddamn helicopter.

"What's the latest from Scott?" he asked.

"Still two days."

Finally, the command post at Alert telephoned the Edmonton rescue
centre.  Ritchie and the Edmonton SARtechs had landed, all right, but
not at the crash site.  They had landed at Alert, and were at that
moment in the command post.  The weather over the crash site prohibited
entry by parachute.

It was ten to one in the morning when Blair, in Edmonton, received word
that the Labrador helicopter from Trenton was limping to Wabush.
Trenton's 424 Squadron was sending flight crews to Wabush to take over
the aircraft and fly it up to Alert.  They needed assistance drawing up
a flight plan.

Blair was stunned.  The last he had heard, the flight had been stood
down due to weather.  He knew they could not make the flight without
frequent refueling stops and directional guidance from an aircraft
flying top cover.  It seemed unlikely that the Labrador could get
through; but it was still Blair's best chance of reaching the survivors
alive.

Blair was fortunate in one regard.  The commanding officer of his base,
Colonel Mike Wansink, who was new to the Edmonton posting, had done what
a good commander does: stand back from the operation but run
interference with higher command.  In a matter of hours, a fluent
command structure had been established from the command post to Air
Transport Group, flowing upwards to the headquarters of Air Command, and
from there to National Defense Headquarters itself.  Which meant that
Blair, a mere major, had the resources of the entire Canadian defense
establishment at his disposal.

The Trenton squadron had intended for a Buffalo aircraft, a twin-engine
light transport, to fly top cover for the Labrador helicopter on the run
up to Alert.  But the Buffalo lacked endurance and sophisticated
avionics.  Blair cast his eyes over the wall map.

"They'll need the Auroras out of Greenwood," he said .

"An Aurora can pick the fleas off a fly's butt."

The Aurora-the most advanced surveillance aircraft in the Canadian
fleet-has range and endurance.  It is used in anti-submarine warfare off
the east coast.  Its primary job is to find and follow submarines; as a
result, it carries a sophisticated array of navigational and detection
instruments.  It has dual inertial navigation systems, a working
transponder, a computer, and terrain-avoidance radar.  It takes a crew
of five just to operate its surveillance systems .

It is, in effect, a flying control tower.

Two of the Auroras, on maritime patrol, had been recalled, and were now
given the task of escorting Mark Levesque and his crew north.  They
would watch the Labrador as carefully as if it were an enemy submarine.

A long shot, Blair thought, but at least now the poor bastards at the
Pole might have a fighting chance.  If the Lab doesn't break down
enroute.  If it isn't beaten back by weather.  If we can find fuel
caches along the way ...

Grounded

During the Hercules flight taking Fred Ritchie's SARtechs from Edmonton
to Alert, the aircraft commander, Major Jim Burger, briefed himself on
the crash by eavesdropping with his high-frequency radio on
communications between the rescue centres.  About four hours into the
flight, he learned that there were survivors on the ground.  He relayed
this information over the microphone to Fred Ritchie in the rear.

Raising his voice above the roar of the Here's engines, Ritchie told his
SARtechs to prepare the gear for a night drop.

Even with the ample cargo space of a Hercules, quarters were cramped.
Rescue equipment and flares were stored in metal cargo containers of the
sort used on ships and trains.  These ran the length of the cargo bay.
Gear was strewn over them, and on the floors, and was hanging from the
fuselage walls.  Parachutes, toboggans, and cargo nets cluttered the
tail section.  The SARtechs had placed their B-25 kits in cargo nets.
Now, in preparation for a jump into the crash site, they strapped
parachutes to these nets and to the 300-pound rescue toboggans.

On the ground, lighting would be a priority.  The SARtechs strapped
strobe lights to the toboggans and to their own helmets.  They taped
chemical lights to everything in sight, since the extreme cold would
rapidly deplete batteries.  They shoved pencil flashlights in their
pockets and clipped miner's headlamps above their visors.  The pockets
of their jumpsuits bulged with personal item ssome carried oranges,
others a flask of brandy.  Jim Brown, as usual, carried a lucky bullet.

While the SARtechs made their preparations, Ritchie wrote out his
operations order.  His plan was to throw one survival toboggan out the
tail door; four SARtechs would jump after the toboggan and retrieve it.
Once those four were established on the ground, the rest of the SARtechs
and survival gear would follow.

Jim Brown had been eating a boxed lunch, his "Explosive" helmet at his
side, when he and some of the other SARtechs noticed that the photo
technician on board was sprawled over cargo bundles, asleep.

Brown reached into his lunch bag for the pepper packet.  He tore it open
and carefully upended the contents into a plastic straw.  Once he was
sure of his ordnance, and of an audience, he stealthily approached the
sleeping photographer.  He placed the straw against the man's nostrils
and blew.  The desired effect was achieved.

Brown waited until the photographer had recovered somewhat before
addressing him.

"Private," Brown said, "my name is Jim Brown.  I am a SARtech.  I am
about to cover myself in shit and glory with the most daring rescue ever
conceived.  My Daddy is a rat farmer in southern Alberta.  I am going to
make my Daddy proud of his son.  And you are here to record the event .

When I sleep, you sleep.  When I work, you work.  Do we understand each
other on that?"

The photographer nodded.

"Take no notice of him," Fred Ritchie yelled above the noise of the
aircraft ." He's crazy.  Jim, get your ass over here.  I want you as
team leader."

Brown sat down beside Ritchie, who had the rescue plan mapped out on a
sheet of paper.

"Jim," Ritchie said, in a tone of remonstrance.

" Nothing wounded but his pride."

Ritchie went through his sketches and orders of deployment, half
shouting to make himself heard.  Brown listened carefully, his eyes
bugging out, which they do when he's paying close attention.

"Our biggest problem will be darkness," said Ritchie .

"We stay together.  The first thing we do after the jump is get together
and count heads."

"Why don't we wait for first light?"

"Because there is no light, Jim."

Brown nodded solemnly.  Ritchie was reminded that Brown, for all his
previous heroics, had no Arctic experience.

"When we penetrate the crash site, we'll split into pairs.  Two on
medical triage, two breaking out the toboggans, and two walking the
perimeter of the site."

Brown gave him a quizzical look.

"I want them tramping down the snow.  Once they've circled the site,
nobody leaves the perimeter.  I don't want anyone getting lost.  And if
any of the survivors have wandered off, the SARtechs on the perimeter
will see their tracks in the snow."

An hour out of Alert, Majorjim Burger in the Edmonton Hercules locked
onto the emergency locator beacon of the downed Hercules.  He radioed
back to Ritchie that they were closing on the crash site.

Burger's own Hercules had an array of radio communications but only one
ultra-high-frequency radio.  UHF was the type of signal used both by the
emergency beacon of Box Top 22 and by the hand-held PRQ 5 0 I radios
that had been stored in the Here's survival kits.

At the crash site below, the downed engineer, Paul West, had recovered
three of these radios and was using them alternately, to preserve
battery life.  When the rescue aircraft came within earshot he used them
again, trying to hail the Edmonton Hercules; but Burger's UHF radio was
tuned to the frequency used by the locator beacon.  For this reason, he
couldn't hear West trying to hail him.  It was a waste of precious
minutes of battery life.

Burger had been vectored by Glow Worm air traffic control at Alert to
the minimum safe altitude of 2,000 feet above the highest ground
obstacle-a height of some 3,600 feet above sea level.  As it turned out,
however, the cloud ceiling over the crash site was about 1,000 feet.
There would be no chance of spotting the wreckage from the minimum safe
altitude.

Burger and John Couch both flew out of 435 Squadron in Edmonton.  They
saw each other every day, drank from the same coffee machine, attended
the same funerals .

Burger's crew on this flight knew Couch's crew on the ground like
family.  Burger didn't hesitate to add one more violation to the growing
list of infractions he committed during the rescue effort.  He busted
the minimums.

As a tactical pilot, Burger felt comfortable flying 500 feet above the
nearest obstacles, or at a circuit altitude of about 1,800 feet above
sea level.  This was about half the minimum altitude he should have
flown on an instrument track.  Glow Worm would get its knickers in a
knot.  Burger raised Glow Worm on the radio and solved the problem the
only way he knew how.  He lied.

He told Glow Worm he was converting to visual flight, even though his
visual references were confined to the dark belly of cloud in which he
was flying.  In reality, he flew on an instrument track, closing on the
crash site at a height of about 800 feet above the ground.  At that
altitude, he'd crash the airplane if he strayed over the higher hills
five miles to the west.  So he instructed Glow Worm to alert him at four
miles offtrack.  He set the radar altimeter to 700 feet and briefed his
crew to call altitude and airspeed.

"If the radalt light goes on,' he said, "I want to know about it."

As the rescue Hercules neared the crash site, the beeping of the locator
beacon grew louder in Burger's ears.  He set 50-percent flap, slowing
the Here to about 150 knots .

He clicked the microphone switch and spoke to the loadmaster in the
rear: "Clear to open."

The tail ramp of the Hercules lowered on its hydraulic arms, and the
temperature inside the cargo bay instantly dropped about 40 degrees
Celsius.  The sound of rushing wind and the droning of the engines
overwhelmed the SARtechs' voices.

"Open and locked," the loadmaster replied.

"Red!" Fred Ritchie shouted.

Corporal Rick Peck-known as Red for the colour of his hair, his neck,
and his temper-looked up.

" Into the monkey tail!"

Peck was a broad-backed youth who weighed in the mid-200-pound range.
Years of tossing hay bales to his horses in St.  Albert, Alberta, had
given him dorsal muscles like wooden planks, and Ritchie wanted him to
toss the gear from the tail.  If anyone could handle a 300-pound
toboggan while buffeted by icy winds in the bucking tail of a Hercules,
it was Peck.

Peck clipped on the restraining harness and made his way along the open
ramp.  He leaned over the edge, trying to catch a glimpse of the ground.
He saw nothing but blackness.  Jim Brown, meanwhile, was sprawled on the
floor of the cargo bay, his head sticking into the Plexiglas bubble of
the Hercules sAR door in the frigid roar of the wind.  He, too, could
see nothing.

Ritchie stood behind Peck, a radio marker beacon and a marker light in
his hands.  The marker was a batterypowered white light on a metal base;
it would provide a visual target for the jumpers.  The jumpers were
suited and ready to go but needed a target.

At five seconds to target, Ritchie gave both markers to Peck.  Then he
grabbed two of the magnesium LUU-2B flares and set the ignition timer to
250 feet.  Peck tossed the two markers over the tail.  The white light
blinked as it plummeted towards the ground, then vanished.

" Malfunction!" Brown shouted.

Ritchie passed the flares to Peck.  Each metal cylinder weighed
twenty-five pounds and gave 3 million candlepower of illumination.  Peck
threw them as if he were tossing basketballs.  The flares ignited but
threw no light on the ground.  It was now clear to everyone that their
Hercules was enveloped in dense cloud, which glowed eerily with bright
orange light.

" Can't see a damn thing!" Brown called.

Desperate as the SARteChs were to reach the survivors, there was no way
they could jump blind.  Ritchie had to admit defeat ." Stop drop," he
said into the microphone.

An air of profound dejection settled instantly over the SARtechs.
Survivors or not, there was nothing to be done .

The Hercules was running dangerously low on fuel.  It was picking up ice
on the wing, and as little as a quarter-inch of ice can bring a plane
down.

"Stop drop," Burger confirmed.  The tail ramp was closed, and Burger
banked the Hercules for a landing at Alert.

Alert is known, by pilots who fly there, for its saucershaped runway.
Snow drifts into the saucer and becomes hard-packed by wind, making the
runway appear level.  In fact, the central segment of the runway is, at
best, trickier than the button; at worst, it can rip out the nose
landing gear.

As Burger prepared to land, the winds at Alert were from the north by
northwest, meaning they were at right angles to the landing strip.
Burger and his copilot, Captain Derek Stobbs, would be landing in a
crosswind of thirty knots.  It was probably gusting higher than that;
aviators regard the weather reports from the Alert station as
notoriously optimistic.  The runway condition was rated at eleven.  A
dry and clear runway is rated at twenty-three; slick ice is rated at
zero.  At the weight Burger was carrying, and with a moderately slick
runway, the Hercules operating manual does not recommend a landing in
crosswinds higher than twenty-seven knots. It would be a white knuckle
approach.

Burger briefed his crew for a crosswind landing.  Stobbs had the wheel.
The wind was coming from his right, so he held the right wing down. This
caused the aircraft to bank; he compensated with hard left rudder.  So
far, so good.  The Hercules landed on the button.  At this point, Stobbs
transferred the flight controls to his commander.

"Your wheel," he said, and he reached for the nose-wheel steering.  At
the same time, he straightened the rudder.  He would not be needing the
rudder, he thought, since he'd be controlling his direction with the
landing gear.  That is the correct procedure in a landing to the south .

Stobbs did not realize the nose wheel had virtually no effect on Alert's
slick, snow-packed gravel runway.

As the rudder straightened, the aircraft became a giant weathervane. The
Hercules achieves its flight characteristics by broad, flat control
surfaces.  The towering rudder caught the wind and yanked the tail 40
degrees to the left .

The Hercules was still moving forward along the centre line of the
runway, but it was in a 40-degree drift, skidding sideways down a short,
narrow strip of frozen gravel at more than 110 knots.

In the cargo bay, the Plexiglas bubbles were still in place-despite
regulations requiring that they be replaced by the steel doors before
landing-and so the SARtechs had a ringside seat for the show.  Fred
Ritchie and his boys gazed out the bubble at the funhouse landing,
wondering if they were finished.

The aircraft was caught in a roaring sideways skid.  It was shuddering
violently, snow and gravel were clattering against its underside, and it
was lurching dangerously to one side.  As it continued its skid, the
right wing lifted skyward and the propellers on the left wing were
driven towards the ground.  To the SARtechs, it looked as if the
Hercules was about to auger in on the left wing and perform a farewell
cartwheel.

"C'mon, Jim," Ritchie said under his breath.

On the flight deck, Burger was gripping the controls and twisting the
yoke to the right.  The right wing gradually responded, falling back
towards the ground, leveling the aircraft.  But it was still in a skid.

"Morerudder!" Burgershouted ." Differentialpower!' Stobbs forced the
left rudder pedal the length of its travel, while his right hand reached
for the engine controls .

He yanked the two left-hand engines back to ground idle position.  The
controls are protected by a gate at this point, to prevent the
application of reverse thrust in flight.  Once Stobbs had lifted the
controls over the gate, the left-wing propellers would be thrusting in
reverse.  It was a delicate step: too much reverse thrust, and the
aircraft would cartwheel to the right.  Too little, and the skid would
not be corrected in time.

"Easy," said Burger.

Stobbs'hands were gentle on the controls as he nudged them back.  With a
delicate touch, he corrected the skid, and sixty-five tons of rogue
Hercules were reined into line .

The aircraft coasted to a stop.

Fred Ritchie looked around the cargo bay, at the scattered equipment and
white faces of the SARtechs.

"Now,' he said ." Wasn't that special?"

Voices in the Dark

The amount of lifesaving equipment carried on board a Hercules is
impressive.  The aircraft routinely flies around the world and has
recently seen service on behalf of Canada in climates as diverse as
Pakistan and Qatar.  It is equipped with gear to help overcome the
extremes of survival at sea, in the desert, in the deep woods, and in
the Arctic.

Box Top 22 had been carrying a twenty-person life raft kit with flares,
a fishing rod, a solar-powered water still, desalination chemicals, a
pocket knife, 200 tablets of Gravol, a whistle, a sponge, and six tubes
of insect repellent.  There was a snake-bite kit.  There was a first-aid
kit with petrolatum and surgical dressings, scissors, and splints .

There were two rolls of red toilet paper, which could be used for
hygiene or as a signal banner.  There were safety matches, a compass, a
rat-tail file, and snare wire.  There was an ax.  There were 500
surgical masks, sunscreen, and mirrors.  There were seven red star
magnesium flares.  There were hand-held radios.  There was a pressure
cooker, a pot, three yellow plastic bowls, and three dessert spoons.
There was a sewing kit, a pad and pencil, and a pack of playing cards.

They were all stored along the fuselage racks.  They were all blown to
hell in the crash.

In the Arctic survival kit there was an assortment of treasure.  The
Canadian Forces are generous in granting their dispensations to fallen
souls.  What comforts, what consolation every kit brings!

All passengers would have tinted sunglasses, so they would not have to
carve eye-shields of ivory, as the Inuit must, to protect their vision
from white-out.  They would be given a snow saw, for carving their cosy
igloo from blocks of snow.  They would have an ice chisel, for reaching
the teeming abundance of marine life under the ice.  A funnel, a whisk
broom, a dozen plastic baggies.  For their temporary quarters, they were
given a survival tent in rugged orange sailcloth, with eight tent
pegs-tent pegs, mind you-in plastic, so as not to damage unduly the
sensitive Arctic permafrost.

Everyone would have a balaclava, and a wool cap to pull over their
balaclava; wool mittens, with leather mittens to pull over their wool
mittens; blended nylon-andwool undersocks, with coarse wool socks to
pull over their undersocks; felt booties, with rubber-and-nylon mukluks
to pull over their felt booties; cotton thermal underwear, with nylon
wind pants to pull over their underwear; and, as the final sign of
consideration, each and every survivor was issued with twenty-four
waterproof matches.

All this was stored in the overhead racks.  All of it was blown to hell
in the crash.

Foraging in the debris, members of the flight crew did find two torn
mukluk liners, black felt and sodden with diesel.  They gave them to a
passenger whose boots had been blown off in the crash.  They found
Arctic mitts, with fleece lining and sheepskin backs, and gave those
away .

The sleeping bag taken from the corpse of Robert Grimsley was given to
Montgomery, whose skull fracture had left him wakeful but confused. Paul
West found a balaclava and pressed it against the head of Wilma de
Groot.

" Want it pulled down over your face?"

Wilma shook her head no.  Paul didn't have a hat.  None of the working
crew had hats.  Now that he was less active, she noticed, Paul was
beginning to shiver.

The flight crew had lace-up leather shoes, which were coated in a frozen
slurry of snow and fuel.  They had polycotton flight suits, which were
beginning to glaze over with frost.

Don't say anything, Wilma.  They're doing this sensibly.  The most
seriously wounded should get the most clothing.  They are not being
irrational.

But Paul's hands, when he'd given her the balaclava, had become icy and
stiff.

West walked away.  In the span of a few paces, he disappeared in the
storm.  She had no idea where he was going, or how he found his way
back.  But he kept returning with things: radios, a fuel stove, a homing
beacon, clothing, flares.  He became the group's finder; he had a
mechanical eye for useful things half buried in snow.

After one of his scavenging trips, he returned with a stretcher.  Its
back was broken, and it was missing one handle, but it was a stretcher
nonetheless.  He set it down by the wing, and then the crew members went
to prepare the tail as best they could.

There was a general and intuitive resolution to move to the tail.  None
of the survivors trusted fire any longer, not since the fireball, and
there seemed little point in building a shelter of grainy snow, even if
they'd had the strength which, by now, they did not.  In the aftermath
of shock, the passengers had become apathetic, seemingly lifeless.  The
flight crew had spent much of their energy reserves.  The metal tail was
assembled, ready for them, beckoning.  The tail was the largest built
structure in their environment, and it was natural that they would
gravitate towards it.

Experts at Arctic survival later noted this mistake .

They noted that the metal skin of the tail would draw the heat of the
survivors' bodies away from them, rather than reflecting it back.  They
noted that the tail was resting at right angles to the prevailing wind;
its gaping mouth would slice the air and carry whirling eddies of ice
crystals over the people inside.  The crystals would melt at first, then
freeze into a coating of ice as they overwhelmed the bodies' defenses.
They noted that it was not good shelter.  But the experts who later
dissected the efficiency of the shelter were not writing their reports
from an and plateau of ice, wind, and rock in a blinding storm.  They
had lamps to write by, and computers to write with.  They had houses
with porch lights awaiting their return.

The tail had traveled some distance on its own, scooping up snow,
diesel, and rock like a goblet passed through greasy time.  It had
itself been ablaze, and a toxic fire of aircraft debris had burned for
some hours at the entrance.  Inside, it stank of fuel and burnt wiring.
The walls were charred black and frosted with ice.  Grey insulation
drooped in sheets from the ribbing; scorched wires tugged at the
survivors' faces as they struggled through the opening.  They could not
see the mess of wires and insulation, even though it was right in front
of their eyes.  It was dark as pitch in the tail.

The ramp section of the tail was resting on a slightangle upwards from
the opening.  Much of the tail section was not useful; snow had packed
itself into the rear.  The habitable space measured about ten feet by
ten feet.  As the passengers walked over the tail section, they stumbled
in the holes of the metal grating of the floor.  It was made of
perforated steel, for weight reduction, and in addition to the
loaf-sized holes there were two larger cavities towards the rear, rather
like wheel wells.  These would serve as toilets, for those able to move.

The flight crew tugged at the insulation, tearing it from the walls `?08/' and
arranging it on the floor.  They placed the insulation panels over the
honeycomb of holes, but the panels were covered with a slick plastic
film and slid about under their feet.  They also dragged in a section of
liferaft or survival tent, it was hard to tell which.  It was a piece of
tarpaulin material, laced with nylon cord.  They laid it down near the
opening, as a cover for the more seriously wounded.  Then they went back
to the wing with the stretcher, ready to load Mario Ellefsen.

Mario did not want to be moved into the tail.  He was cold, he was
scared, and he did not want his broken pelvis to be jostled about.  When
he'd tried to move, the bones of his pelvis had ground together loudly
and the pain had been almost unbearable.

Mario looked over at Monty, beside him.  It was hard to tell what had
happened to Monty.  There was blood spilling from his boots, he had
lacerated his left arm, he had a depressed skull fracture, and there
seemed to be fatty tissue exposed on his fractured skull.  Mario turned
his head and studied Tony Cobden.  He too had some kind of head injury.
His scalp looked rather as though he were wearing a bad toupee, and the
cold had not closed the wound because the head and neck generate so much
of the body's heat.  Blood continued to ooze down his face.  It had
discoloured the entire front of his parka and his wind pants, an
unbelievable amount of blood.

"Okay,' Mario said ." Move me.  But Jesus, don't drop me."

They placed him on a stretcher.  He helped them as best he could,
dragging himself onto the canvas with his elbows .

Joe Bales tried to steady Mario's hips and felt the pelvic bone
shifting.  Mario screamed profanities.

It was a tough struggle to move the stretcher cases into the tail.
Neither Montgomery nor Vance had screamed as loudly as Ellefsen, but the
crew were in constant fear of dropping them.

As they were half lifting, half dragging the stretcher across the snow,
Couch stumbled over a pair of mukluks .

His feet were not cold at that point, but they were wet.  He would need
the mukluks later, but he couldn't stop right then.  It would take
twenty minutes to untangle the frozen knot of his laces, and his feet
would freeze during the transfer.  He had to get the remaining
passengers into the tail.  He set the mukluks aside, with a mental note
to return to that spot and collect them later.  But by then the blizzard
was in full force, and the mukluks had become covered with snow.  He
searched for them, with one of the pencil flashlights the crew had
recovered, but in vain.

As they carried Vance, he remarked: "It's getting much colder.  I can
feel it.  The temperature is going down."

"There's a storm," West told him.

"And I can hear a plane," Vance said.

West looked down at Vance's swollen face.  The eyelids were shut
grotesquely tight.

"You've got good ears, buddy," he said ." You're right .

There's a plane up there.  You listen for us, all right?  Tell us when a
plane's coming.  We need to know."

Vance said he would.

By the time they returned to the wing to assist the survivors who were
able to walk, the crew members were again dripping with sweat.  They
continued to work that way for another hour, in the steadily worsening
temperature and wind.

There is a little saying drilled into students at the Arctic survival
school conducted by the Armed Forces each winter, a rule of thumb about
the essentials of life in the cold: "Sweat and die."

The survivors were laid across the breadth of the tail like cordwood,
with their feet towards the entrance and their heads in the stinking
darkness.  It was a tight squeeze .

There was a long period of bumping and jarring as they settled
themselves.  The insulation kept slipping out of place; knees and feet
and elbows got caught in the grating; there were moans and curses and
whimpers of pain.  At last, it became silent.

Wilma de Groot realized that she knew virtually no one around her.  She
knew Paul, and liked him.  Then there was young Mike, the one whose face
had been burned in the fire.  And Joe, who she assumed was the pilot.
And then there was John, who had been so worried about leaving Sue and
Bob out in the snow.

Paul, Mike, Joe, and John.

"Who's here?" she called out ." Paul, are you here?" From behind her
came a voice ." I'm here.  Mike's here .

John and Joe are out with the others."

There was a scurrying sound, and she heard someone moving towards her.
Someone was right there, in front of her face.  It was Mike.

"Doc, can you see me?"

"Not really," she said.

"It'smybalaclava,Doc.There'ssomething wrong with it.  It feels like it's
stuck to my face."

She heard him scratching and tugging at it, and then the orange-white
light of a flare that had been dropped from overhead lit up the tail
section, and she made herself look at his face, though she had a good
idea of what she'd see .

The black balaclava, a wool-and-polyester knit blend, had been covering
his face when the fireball exploded.  The synthetic fibre had melted,
and the skin of his face had melted, and the two materials had mingled
together into a wet slurry.  As the blood, flesh, and fibre had dried,
they had all fused together into something that was neither quite a face
nor a balaclava.  It was impossible to tell which part of the mask was
made of scabbing blood and which part was made of black material.  From
this awful mask, Moore's eyes shone, bright and uncomplaining.  Then the
light from the flare faded, and they were back in total darkness.

"Help me peel it off."

"No, Mike!  Leave it.  Don't touch it."

He returned to his place, and Wilma began to see that the first
principle of survival was not the elevation of the wretched to the
comforts enjoyed by the more fortunate, but the slow putrefaction of
all, towards the lowest common denominator of misery.  The strong will
become weak, the first become last.

Wilma's broken ankle now gnashed, bone against bone, whenever she moved.
It also gnashed when others moved, tugging at the tarpaulin that lay
over top of her.

The best she could do was wait for the morphia of cold.  Her own body
had become as helpless as Mike Moore in his black mask; the corruption
had begun.

She lay quietly in the darkness for a while, listening to the others and
the sound of the storm.  They were, all of them, reduced to nothing now.
They had no territory, no status, no meaning; their lives were nothing
more than the fog of their own breath in the freezing night.  They could
do nothing but wait for death or deliverance.

But they all had names, and names are powerful things .

The name calls into existence, and calls into being the bonds of
existence.  God made Adam, and named him; and Eve also.  Man named all
of the animals.  Even God was a name.

Captain Richard Dumoulin, with the smashed cheek and dislocated eye, was
the first to invoke her name.  He was a mature man of forty-four; he
seemed kind.  He had studied psychology and history, had counseled
younger recruits; he had become a logistics officer because he liked to
serve people's needs.

"Hey, Doc,' he said in the darkness.  'Everybody calls you Doc.  What's
your real name?"

"My name is Wilma."

The words were exchanged in darkness; no one could see anyone else.  But
everyone could hear everything.

"Did you say Thelma?"

"No.  Not like Thelma and Louise.  Wilma.  Like the Flintstones."

"Well," he said.  'My name is Rick."

"Okay, Nick," she said.  Why not?  It would help them to remember.

"All right, Thelma." Wilma heard some chuckles.  Dear God, it was fine,
to have them chuckle at her expense.  It was fine.

"My name is Mario," came a frightened voice.

"Like Super Mario?" Wilma asked.

"I'm sure not feeling very super right now."

She laughed ." Okay, Super Mario.  Super Mario and Rick.  Who else is
here?"

Suddenly the names came from all directions in the darkness.  Wilma told
herself to remember, the names were important.  They were mortally
important.  To remember, she imposed meaning on the names.  She knew
that four of the survivors had life-threatening injuries; in military
code, these are called "reds." She recited to herself the names of the
reds: Bill, Dave, Mario, Monty.  Then there was the four-man crew: Paul,
Mike, Joe, John.  That was two sets of four, she thought.  The third set
of four names was Tony, Mare, Rick, and me.  Then there were the two
outside, Sue and Bob, the ones John hadn't wanted to move.  That made
fourteen.

"All right,' said Wilma ." Let's see if I've got this straight.  Bill."

"Here."

"Dave."

"Here."

And on down the line.  She saved the crew for last, and when she came to
John and Joe, there was no answer.

"They're out with the others,' said Paul.

The roll call had been established, voices in the dark .

They were no longer fourteen individuals who'd lived through a plane
crash.  They were a community.

Acceptable Risk

Major Mary Macauley and his copilot, Captain Randy Price, had spent most
of the seven-hour flight from Greenwood, Nova Scotia, scanning their
high-frequency radio, trying to find out what the devil was going on in
the effort to rescue the survivors of Box Top 22.

Mary's squadron was the target of a certain jealousy from other Hercules
flights in Canada for its sophisticated avionics and radio systems.  His
airframe was the 1965 E model, the same model that was now in burning
pieces on the ground.  But he was equipped with the most modern
navigation systems available and had a full array of radios:
high-frequency'very-high-frequency'andultra-high-frequency .

Mary always knew where he was in the air and could talk to anyone he
liked.  In the Canadian Forces fleet, his Here was as rare as Noah's
Ark.

At one point Mary's crew had raised a military post, which connected
them through a telephone patch to the Trenton headquarters of the Air
Transport Group.  At other times they raised Edmonton.  Once in a while
they picked up a stray bounce from other Canadian Forces aircraft.  But
nobody was able to tell Mary the one bit of information he needed to
know: the crash coordinates.

The land mass covered by the rescue effort was a formidable obstacle to
command and control.  The Canadian rescue centres, operating with a few
squadrons of aircraft and roughly a groSS of SARtechs, cover a wedge
shaped are measuring 90 degrees longitude and 41 degrees latitude-a
quarter of the hemisphere's span.  If this rescue area were placed over
Europe, it would begin at Tralee on the west coast of Ireland and extend
east nearly as far as Moscow.  Along its southern border, it would pass
the cities of Dieppe, Frankfurt, Prague, Cracow, and Kiey.  It would
embrace all of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the newly
liberated Baltic states.  It would include large chunks of
Czechoslovakia and Germany, and a corner of France; the Baltic Sea, the
North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea, and, for good measure,
the island of Spitsbergen.

Rescue work costs the Canadian military about $110 million a year, less
than 1 percent of the Armed Forces budget.  Yet it is one of the Forces'
few operational units, and SARtechs are the most highly decorated group
of individuals in the military.  Among SARtechs still or until recently
serving, there were five Stars of Courage, Canada's highest decoration.
There were fourteen Medals of Bravery, eight Medals of Military Merit,
two Queen's Commendations, four Orders of St.  John of Jerusalem,
twenty-eight Chief of Defence Staff commendations, ten Air Command
commendations, thirteen Air Transport Group commendations, twelve base
commander's commendations, four U.S.  House of Representatives Awards,
and four Airman of the Year awards.  That's an impressive record for an
outfit the size of four platoons with no commissioned officer, all the
more so considering that the list does not include flight crews, who
have their own record of decorations.

A reading of the Register of Canadian Honours gives some flavour of the
character of SARtechs and of the heritage to which they aspire.  But
those are accounts of remarkable rescues that drew recognition; they do
not give any sense of the SARtechs' dally stock-in-trade of lost,
foolish, and desperate souls.  Their work is nearly always done in
isolation; they have no photo opportunities, and there are no dramatic
re-enactments for the nightly news.  Their military adventures have
little to do with the roar of jet fighters or the clatter of tanks; and
they are far removed from the public's appetite for politics, finance,
and intrigue.  Their pulse quickens to the tiny sound of a homing beacon
cheeping in the woods, an arm waving a red handkerchief from the deck of
a dory, a set of footprints in the snow.

SARtechs received scant public recognition even for their involvement in
one of the largest peacetime marine rescues in history.  In October
1980, the 400-foot Dutch cruise ship myPrinsendam foundered some 150
miles offshore in the Gulf of Alaska.  The vessel was ablaze and the
passengers and crew were going overboard.  A supertanker had reached the
area, but it was impossible to transfer passengers between the ships
because of forty-knot winds and high seas.  Visibility was poor; the
cloud ceiling was 100 feet.  The U.S.  Coast Guard requested Canadian
SARtech assistance.  The first Canadian Labrador helicopter to respond
was knocked out by an electrical fire on board; it ditched over land.
The second hoisted thirty-one survivors from one lifeboat, found the
lost passengers of another, and landed with only minutes of fuel
remaining.  On shore, Canadian SARtechs treated some 300 survivors for
hypothermia and shock.  In all, more than 500 lives were saved; not a
soul was lost.

The Prinsendam has entered SARtech folklore but lies outside the memory
of the Canadian public.  The very existence of SARtechs is scarcely
known, even among the Canadian military.  Search and rescue is known as
a place where pilots and unaspiring soldiers go to finish their careers,
devoid of glamour, recognition, or advancement.  sAR is the runt of the
military litter.  SARhird pilots bitch about the 'bombs and bullets'
boys at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa, who have visions Of
CF-18 fighters dancing in their heads and want the Canadian Forces out
of the rescue trade altogether.

They bitch, and they go about their business.

Mary's copilot, Captain Randy Price, had the easy good looks and tight
blond curls of the doomed aviator in black-and-white Battle of Britain
films.  But he had been devoted to the work of SARtechs for over a
decade, and been accepted among them.  He played hockey on the same line
as Arnie and Mary, and shared their gung-ho attitude.  The SARtechs
called him Randy, which was all the recognition he desired.

He himself had been decorated for bravery, four times .

The first of these, a Chief of Defense Staff commendation, was earned in
his first year on the job.  A U.S.  Navy Labrador had slammed into the
vertical cliff face of an American mountain during a foul-weather search
for a lost Canadian climber.  SARtechs were called to assist.  The
copilot and a deputy sheriff had survived, although Price didn't know
that.  One had both arms broken and was unable to switch on his homing
beacon.  The other was 300 feet below him, with two broken legs.  The
winds were at seventy knots and the mountain was shrouded in cloud at
7,000 feet, where the survivors lay.

Price's Labrador arrived with four SARtechs on board .

They had started to rappel down to a small ledge on the cliff face when
the pilot became disoriented, lost control of the aircraft, and told the
SARtechs to jump for their lives.  They scrambled down their Sky Genie
ropes, but the flight engineer said, "We're not abandoning ship," and
Price calculated a safe heading.  The helicopter performed a pedal turn
into the wind.  They were in a cut in the mountain, with a cliff face to
either side, and adrift.  Price thought he knew a heading to safety, but
the aircraft commander disagreed.  So the young copilot mashed over the
cyclic control and performed a spiraling dive to safety.

The SARtechs had meanwhile mountaineered to the survivors, buttheU.S.
helicopter pilots on stand-byrefused to fly up the mountain in those
conditions.  The Canadian Labrador returned-hitting drafts that at times
slammed it downwards at 2,000 feet per minute, and at other times forced
it to hover ten feet from the cliff face-and pulled the survivors off
the mountain ledge.

Price was on his way to becoming a respected rescue pilot.  He still
carried remnants of his earlier attitude .

Rescue work, he believed, involved risk.  In an operational military
environment, casualties are expected.  While younger pilots arrived with
a more cautious attitude, Price thought it necessary in search and
rescue to take risks; and the hardest decisions he ever made were the
decisions to give up and go home.

Closing on Alert, Mary's Hercules from Greenwood triedto raisemajorjim
Burger'sHerculesfrom Edmonton .

Mary tried the radio every few seconds; finally, the weather office in
Alert came up on frequency 126.7.  Weather stations in remote outposts
like Alert are not known for their strict adherence to radio procedure.
A voice in Mary's headset said, "Hey, listen, you guys."

" Yeah?"

"Stop trying to call Rescue Three Four Two.  It's already on the ground.
Who are you guys, anyway?  Rescue Three Three Eight?"

"Who's that?"

"The second Here out of Edmonton.  The MAJAID flight.

Is that you?"

"No," said Mary ." We're Rescue Three Zero Five out of Greenwood."

"We don't have anything on a flight out of Greenwood .

We're waiting for Rescue Three Three Eight."

"Listen to me, buddy," said Mary ." I've got fourteen SARtechs and a
hundred and thirty flares on board, and it would be very frigging nice
to penetrate the frigging crash site.  If someone there would be kind
enough to give me the frigging coordinates."

"I can give you the general vicinity.  But I better patch you through to
the command post."

The VHF signal from the command post was weak, and efforts to squelch
the static only buried the voices.  Through the static, Mary's earphones
picked up another sound: the faint, undulating "ping, ping, ping" of the
emergency locator beacon.

"Never mind,' he said.  'We've picked up the homer." Price was flying
the aircraft; Mary, although aircraft commander, was in the right seat.
He preferred it that way; he could focus on the mission and leave the
flying to his first officer.  The pinging grew louder in his ears, until
they were right over the beacon.

Their droning aircraft was shrouded in blackness; at that altitude,
4,000 feet, they were enclosed in a thick layer of cloud that extended
all the way down to the 1,000-foot elevation of the crash site.

"Let's drop a flare," said Mary.  'See what's down there."

The established procedure for night flare illumination of a target is
straightforward.  The pilot flies upwind or crosswind of target and
drops the flare.  Once ignited, the twenty-five pounds of magnesium
burns for five minutes, casting a vast umbrella of light as it falls to
the ground beneath its parachute.  The pilot banks the aircraft into a
descending left turn of 1,000 to 2,500 feet per minute, chasing the
flare on its descent.  The flare is kept on the left side of the
aircraft as the pilot spirals downwards, circling the flare until he
reaches minimum safe altitude.  SARtechs on the left side of the
aircraft scan the ground, searching for signs of wreckage.

The procedure was standard, but these conditions were not.  There is
normally no call for a night flare illumination through cloud; neither
is it usual to follow a flare in winds gusting above thirty knots, as
SARtechs never jump at such wind speeds.

"Flare clear."

"Ignition."

The clouds around the aircraft were suddenly bathed in orange light.  As
Price banked the aircraft 90 degrees to the left, Mary shaded his eyes,
trying to peer through the surrealistic vapour; everything was orange,
and uniformly bright.

"Can't make out the goddamn flare."

Price flew downwind, parallel to the imagined course of the LUU-2B
canister, then banked left 90 degrees once more, throwing an aerial
lariat around the descending flare.

"We don't want to wear that guy as a hood ornament,' said Mary.

Magnesium will burn through the skin of a Hercules like hot coals
through silk.  It is an exaggeration to say that a flare can slice the
aircraft in half; it is not an exaggeration to say it can sever control
cables, damage hydraulics, or set the aircraft ablaze.  Flare patterns
are carefully planned so the dripping magnesium stays well clear of
jumpers, crash sites, and the Hercules itself

Mary and Price were both squinting through the pulsing orange glow
around them when an orb suddenly gained definition in the cloud bank.
The circle of light shrank in size and grew more intense as the orb drew
nearer.  By the time Mary realized what was happening, the flare was
plainly visible as a white-hot cylinder of dripping incandescence.
They'd descended into the path of the flare.

" Flare!" Mary shouted ." Twelve o'clock!'

The flare was ahead and above the nose of the aircraft, and they were
closing on it at a speed of 150 knots.  Price found himself in one of
those moments when acceptable risk turns to imminent peril.  The burning
magnesium flare was drifting, he knew, at a speed of about thirty knots.

Without other visual clues, it was impossible to tell in which direction
it was drifting.  With a pencil and a pad of paper, he could have
figured it out in a few seconds; but in a few seconds, magnesium might
well be scorching through the windscreen.

Price made an instinctive crank and bank to the left.  The Hercules sat
on its left wing, bled airspeed, and climbed.  The flare streaked away
to the right side of the aircraft.

"Good call," said Mary.  He spoke lightly, but relief was written on his
face.

"What now?"

"I'm going to be honest," said Mary ." I've got cold feet."

"Want to go home?"

"We're not doing any good here."

Because the Alert runway was already chock-a-block with Hercules
aircraft from the mounting rescue operation, Rescue 305 headed for Thule
to put down.  After an uneventful landing, the team from Greenwood
headed for the transient quarters.

Once Arnie had grabbed a bite to eat, he had a chat with his brother. It
was an argument, really, a heated difference of opinion regarding
acceptable risk.  Normally, the two saw eye-to-eye, but the extremes of
polar rescue are not normal.  Arnie figured Mary had let himself become
rattled by the flare.  Mary thought that Arnie, frustrated by the
knowledge that his good buddies were hurt and helpless, had lost his
perspective on the question of acceptable risk.

SARtechs are a breed apart.  They have a firm belief in their own
capabilities.  The commander of their branch of the Air Force,
Brigadier-General Gord Diamond, was himself a respected SAR pilot of
Buffalo and Labrador aircraft and developed a healthy respect for the
'daily heroism" of the group.  He casts a tolerant eye on their
undisciplined nature, calling it a form of "necessary arrogance." But
not all senior officers relish the fact that SARtechs tend to salute
when they feel like it, wear uniforms when they feel like it, or call
officers " Sir" and refer to them by rank when they feel like it, which
is usually when they think the senior officer is a first-class dink.  As
a group, SARtechs lack the flattery and polish so essential to
advancement in today's armed services, because they would rather be
regular guys than dinks.

They have, it is true, a sentimental side.  Many SARtechs are injured in
the line of duty, and some are killed.  These are revered in the
collective memory, and the symbol of the reverence is the red beret.  On
the wall of every SARtech unit is a poem, written after the death of
eight members of a rescue crew in an Arctic crash in 1970.  It was
written by the widow of one of those killed, Corporal Bill Platt.  In
part, it reads:

Hush, my son, don't cry.

You're too wise for your three years.

I can't tell you why he died,

I don't know how to dry your tears.

I can tell you that he loved you,

I could tell you to great length.

But we weren't the only ones

That depended on his strength.

There were many other people

With little boys like you,

That Daddy went to look for

Because it's what he had to do.

Someday you'll be a man,

And go your separate way.

But I know I'll be damned proud

If you wear a Red Beret.

The poem may be cloyingly sentimental, but there isn't a SARtech around
who can recite it without pausing to clear his throat, or who doesn't
believe every word-Mary and Arnie Macauley included.  The poem helps
explain the importance of the red beret as a symbol of their work; it
helps explain the motivation of people like Mary and Arnie; and it sheds
some light on their disagreement.

If the SARtechs had tried to jump in those conditions, Mary reasoned,
there would almost certainly have been casualties.

Then what would they have done?  Thrown more lumpers after them?  Added
more bodies to the casualty pile?

Arnie saw it differently.  Maybe there would have been casualties. Maybe
the first guy out would have paid the price.  So be it.  And if there'd
been casualties in the first group, all the more reason to send jumpers
after them.  You couldn't just leave them there.

At Thule, the Macauley brothers never did settle their difference,
perhaps because it grew out of the thorniest question that underlies
rescue work: When do you risk a life to save a life?  SARtechs seldom,
except in private moments and with fumbling words, articulate when and
why they would do such a thing.  They may all have had different
definitions of acceptable risk, but they all had this baseline in
common.  They did not value their own lives any more than those of the
suffering souls on the ground.  But they did not value them any less,
either.

In theory, Mary was commander of the aircraft, with authority to cancel
the jump.  Next time they got airborne y over the crash site, the
decision would be his.  In practice, however, he knew it would be a
difficult order to enforce.

The brothers walked away, leaving the matter unresolved.  But each had
made an inner resolution.

Arnie had decided he would be the first jumper out the door, and
wouldn't tell Mary until he was on the ground .

He thought that was pretty clever.

Mary figured Arnie would probably try to outsmart him by being the first
jumper out the door.  He decided to respect his brother's wishes,
although he wouldn't tell him so until later.

Mary was worried sick about his older brother.  He didn't tell him that,
either.

Mission Impossible

Captain Mark Levesque stepped from the deadhead flight from Trenton and
hurried over to the waiting helicopter.  The Buffalo had flown him to
Wabush, near Labrador City on the border between northern Quebec and
Newfoundland.  Despite his French name, Levesque was an anglophone.
Political boundaries meant nothing to him.  His main interest was the
distance to the nearest fuel dump; his main worry was sleep deprivation.

The military's normal fatigue limits and twelve-hour 'bottle to
throttle' rule-no flying within a half-day of taking a drink were out
the window.  Levesque had slept three hours in the previous twenty-four
and had something like forty hours of flying time ahead of him.  He was
exhausted, and the flight north would be grueling, at best .

But a Labrador helicopter was needed at Alert; someone had to fly it
there, or at least make the attempt; and he happened to be the someone.
He tried to push his weariness to the back of his mind, and consulted
the flight charts.

The rescue centre was working one step ahead of Levesque, uncovering the
remote caches of jp-40 aviation fuel stored across the High Arctic.
These would be his stepping-stones to the North Pole.  He would not
know, from one stone to the next, what his next destination would be.
Neither would he be able to raise the Edmonton rescue centre while in
flight; he would rely on radio-telephones

from each isolated Inuit fishing village along the way.  All in all, it
struck him as a bit hare-brained.  But he was a soldier.  He was a
rescue pilot.  The crash victims were family.  Besides, the notion was
kind of intriguing.

Levesque spoke with his first officer and his engineer, his finger
tracing the route.

"The Aurora won't pick us up until Fort Chimo," he said ." You can see
the lines of magnetic variation, here .

About 80 degrees-a quarter of the rose.  Magnetic compass won't be much
help.  The directional gyro's out-it's been out of service for four
years.  HQ says they're working on it.  We might have gyro compass in a
day or two.

"The long and the short is, we'd better make use of the daylight while
we've got it."

" Fuel stops?" the engineer asked.

"We find out enroute.  And one thing-we never shut her down.  The old
workhorse might get us there, but if we let the engines go down, forget
it."

The crew was contemplating a flight of nearly forty hours through
extreme climates.  The Labrador, on average, has a minor mechanical
breakdown every one and a half hours; it has a malfunction serious
enough to render it incapable of performing its mission every six hours.
Levesque figured the only chance of stretching its endurance was to keep
the engines and blades turning.  But this raised a hazard of its own.

The engineer blanched ." Hot refuel the whole way?" Levesque nodded. Hot
refueling was an approved procedure for the Labrador but only in dire
emergency.  It meant the engineer would pump explosive aviation gas into
the fuel sponsons--the outboard fuel tanks on both sides of the rear
fuselage-located only a few feet from a burning jet engine.  The tandem
rotors would be spinning above his head, an added danger.  He would be
using an electrical pump or, where there was no electricity, handpumping
the fuel from forty-five-gallon drums.  Because of the whine of the
engines, he would be unable to talk or hear

shouted commands.  And he would be working in darkness, with numb hands,
frozen hoses, and awkward couplings .

One spill, one spark, and they would all go up in flames.

"Let's get started," Levesque said ." We're burning daylight."

Levesque began the starting sequence.  The twin GE turbine engines
coughed to life, producing a total of 2,700 shaft horsepower.

The airframe was nearly as old as Levesque, but the Boeing-built
Labrador has considerable abilities, despite its age.  Still, Levesque
would have to coax every ounce of effort from the machine to make the
trip.

He had certain advantages.  A single-rotor helicopter produces yaw from
the spinning of the overhead blades, so a tail rotor is needed to keep
the aircraft straight, resulting in wasted horsepower.  The Labrador's
fifty-foot blades chop the air in a counter-rotational direction, which
means no yaw and no wasted energy; it all goes into lift.

At nearly eleven tons, the Labrador is a medium-sized aircraft, but its
massive blades can carry it to a height of 10,000 feet.  Long before
then, however, its performance deteriorates; it becomes sloppy in thin
air, a little like driving on ice.  It is not unusual, especially in the
Far North, to encounter weather systems rising to an altitude of 10,000
feet.  Levesque would have two options.  He would be flying either very
low or very high.

Any advantage in aviation has a cost.  The 125-knot cruising airspeed of
the Labrador is impressive, but this gain is achieved at the expense of
endurance.  The Labrador is a short-range helicopter.  A normal fuel
load is 4,000 pounds, giving it a range of 440 nautical miles and an
endurance of three hours and forty minutes.  Pilots prefer this load,
since there is less fuel to dump in case of engine failure, and the Lab
is slow at dumping fuel.

Levesque elected to take the maximum fuel load of 5,000 pounds.  This
decision would add fifty nautical miles to his range and thirty-five
minutes to his endurance, which could save his life.  In the event of a
breakdown, however, his decision could cost him his life.  Any advantage
in aviation has a cost.

A polar attempt should have been made with an airrefuelable helicopter,
but the Canadian Forces had none .

Tile trip would be planned in strides of less than 600 nautical miles.
The next footfall from Wabush was Kuujjuaq, three hours' flying time and
325 nautical miles to the north, on Quebec's shore of Ungave Bay.

Accompanied by a copilot, a flight engineer, and two SARtechs, Levesque
launched at one-thirty in the afternoon, under daylight visual
conditions.  Northern Quebec and Labrador is a black hole for the Omega
navigational system, so it was fortunate they could follow landmarks .

Perhaps this wouldn't be so bad after all.

Less than halfway to Kuujjuaq, Levesque was flying about 100 feet above
the impenetrable northern forest, taking advantage of the dense air at
lower levels, when he noticed that the trees faded out in the distance
ahead.  His eyes must have been playing tricks on him.  The forest
extended to a range of rising hills, then seemed to stop abruptly.  It
seemed as though the hills were set against a solid painted mural of
grey canvas.

As he drew closer, he realized the backdrop was a weather front,
starting at the ground layer and rising vertically some two miles.
Levesque gave a whistle of admiration for a formidable opponent.

"All right," he said to his copilot ." See if you can hail anyone on the
HF radio.  Transmit to all military stations.

We've got to know what's behind that weather."

The first officer worked the radio but finally gave up .

"Nothing," he said ." The LIF is useless."

Levesque decided to puncture the cloud and fly blind .

On his other radio, he could raise the same Buffalo aircraft that had
dropped him in Wabush.  The Buffalo was now above him, ferrying the
second flight crew a few steppingstones up the line.

"Raise Rescue Four Five Two and file an immediate IFR flight plan,' he
said ." Base it on our present lat-long." Levesque was thinking ahead:
if the Labrador went down in the bush, the filed instrument flight rules
plan would aid in the search for his aircraft.

The curtain drew nearer, and he steadied his hands and feet on the
controls.  His eyes locked onto the flight instruments, for he knew that
as soon as he entered the weather system he would lose all sense of
orientation.  Unlike the pilot of a fixed-wing aircraft, he would have
to concentrate on stabilizing the helicopter in all three dimensions. He
steeled himself; the helicopter chopped ahead; the weather system hit
him like a physical blow.

The Labrador disappeared from the world and entered a twilight of steel
grey.  Levesque experienced vertigo; he fought to restore his balance
and ward off nausea by fixing his gaze on the instrument panel.  His
head swam; and he noticed that waves of fatigue were mixed in with his
imbalance.  He fell silent, hypnotic, on the controls.

He was jerked to attention by one of the SARtechs in the rear: 'Mark!
Ice on the stub tanks!'

The Lab had entered an ice system.  Levesque had been suckered.  He
looked up at his windscreen; it had been converted to dimpled glass. Ice
was rapidly forming on the forward surfaces of the aircraft.  The
aviator has many assassins-disorientation, fatigue, engine failure-but
ice is the swift, silent killer.

Ice on the lifting surfaces of a fixed-wing aircraft kills by adding
weight and disturbing the gentle curve of lowpressure air over the wing;
the aircraft stalls, then crashes .

It is no less punishing on a helicopter.  Ice on the rotors can destroy
lift, but the Labrador had a special vulnerabilitythe engine vents.

The Labrador's engines are shielded by metal screens on the forward
inlets, about the same gauge as that used on car headlamps.  The screens
prevent foreign objects from fouling the turbines, but they are not
heated, and they gather ice as a net gathers fish.  When the screens ice
over, the engine chokes, the blades stop turning, and the aircraft
falls.  There is a cruel twist to this: the ice, at the same time as it
suffocates the engines, also gathers on the inboard edge of the rotors.
This is the part of the blade that provides auto-rotational lift during
an engine failure.  If the engines die, the blades are designed to spin
freely as they fall through the air and provide enough control so the
Labrador can, at least, make a stable forced landing without power.  But
not if the rotors are iced.  If the rotors are iced, the aircraft
tumbles.  When ice brings down a Labrador, it brings it down for good.

Levesque thought hard and fast.  The outside temperature was about -5
Celsius.  He brought the Labrador down to treetop level, hoping to duck
underneath the weather system; but then the temperatures rose to the
range between -2 and the freezing point, the worst range for ice.  He
had no choice but to climb and hope for drier, colder weather at higher
altitude.  Climbing with ice on board is counter to an aviator's reflex,
with engine failure imminent; but it often works.  All it takes is iron
nerve and a complete poverty of options.

He put all the engine's torque into lift; the helicopter began to rise
vertically through the cloud bank; already the Lab's performance was
weakened.  It struggled upwards past 5,000 feet, and 6,000 and 7,000. It
passed through snow showers.  It reached 8,000 feet, and then,
sluggishly, 9,000.  Levesque was near his ceiling, but the gambit had
worked.  The ice was still gathering on the Lab, but at a much slower
rate.  He'd bought himself time.

Levesque lifted the tall of his yellow SARhird and edged on.  His
forward speed was reduced by the power needed to maintain his altitude,
and the distance to Kuujjuaq had, in real terms, doubled.  He did a
mental calculation of the distance remaining, and of his own endurance.
He was cutting it fine, but the choice was made for him.  He was past
the point of no return for Wabush.  He had no alternate landing field.

Three hours after leaving Wabush, deduced reckoning, based on his
airspeed and direction, told him he was approaching Kuujjuaq-still known
among pilots by its colonial name, Fort Chimo.

"We're coming into Chimo," Levesque told himself .

"We're high, we're low on gas, we're picking up ice, we're past the
point of return.  We've got one shot at it."

He spotted a break in the clouds.  It wasn't a clear opening, but it was
the only shot he had.

" It's now or never," he said.

The Labrador descended through the broken cloud layer, clearing the base
of the weather system a few hundred feet above the ground.  From where
they hovered, they could see the lights of Kuujjuaq.

Mark Levesque set the aircraft down, unstrapped his harness, and hurried
to the aviation shed.  There he would pick up the black radio-telephone
and receive his orders .

He would follow them.  He'd follow them in spite of the fatigue crawling
from his shoulders, through the tense muscles of his forearms, into the
hands still tingling from the controls.  The frozen tarmac swayed
beneath him; he had rubber legs.  He felt bleary and delirious.

Levesque had fought his way through a weather front that would have
brought down many pilots.  He'd been virtually lost in the air for
two-thirds of the journey.  He'd faced deadly ice for 200 miles, and
he'd been at the very limit of the helicopter's endurance when he'd
finally broken through cloud.  He had been flying with no radio or
navigational aids, against the storm, in a hands-on posture for two
hours straight.  He was spent in body and soul.  He had three hours of
the flight behind him, and thirty-three hours ahead of him.

He had just completed the easiest leg of his voyage.

Brother John

With snow packed around her thighs and chest, and a stinking rag over
her face, Sue Hillier lay in the endless dark, thinking she was in a
coffin.  So cold, so black, so deathly quiet ...

No.  Not quiet.  Something had changed.  It was dark and noisy.  She had
not noticed.  The wind was loud, now that she listened to it, a huge
roaring sound, consuming so much of her hearing that she hadn't even
been aware of it .

How did it get so strong?  She imagined the wind being born at the North
Pole, swirling into strength, gaining brawn as it blew south, growing
into a tidal force as it swept over the frozen sea, crashing against the
rocky shore.

Yes, that's what it sounded like.  It sounded like the ocean.  It
climbed over the hills and flooded her; she was a tiny thing,
insignificant.

It wasn't like the wind in Trenton at all; the wind there had been
sliced and bent and spun around things.  At home, you never heard the
wind itself, only its footfall: the scattering of papers on the street
to stiap at your heels, the rustling of leaves to disturb your reading,
the creaking of doors to make you start.  Like so many things in life
before the crash, the wind in Trenton related to her, took her into
account.  This wind roared right past, as unaware of Sue as a black
freight passing in the night.  It made her feel small and alone.

She strained to hear something, anything, besides the wind.

"Bob?

There was nothing.  Oh God.

"Bob!" Her mangled tongue filled her mouth ." Bob!'

"Uhn."

"It's okay, Bob.  You don't have to talk.  I just want to know you're
all right.  Are you all right?"

"Uhn."

" Okay."

Sometimes Bob felt like talking, sometimes he didn't .

That was all right.  She just wanted to know she wasn't alone.

"Hear that wind, Bobo"

"Uhn."

"It sounds like the wind at my uncle's farm in Alberta .

My parents went out there for their anniversary, but I couldn't go, I
was too busy getting ready for this trip.  Most of my family out west
have these huge farms.  We're the only ones on my mom's side not on the
farm.  I like cattle .

I like outdoors stuff.  Are you an outdoors person, Bob?" There was no
answer.

"Bob?  ...  Bob!"

"Uhn."

"Just let me know you're here.  just grunt so I know you're here."

" Uhn."

She laughed.  It hurt to laugh, but it seemed so funny all of a sudden
." Just grunt, Bob.  Just be a typical man and grunt so I know you're
alive."

No response.  Well, she'd tried to get a rise out of him .

What could they talk about next?

"Bob?  I like basketball and, let's see, I like horses.  Do you like
horses?  I trained horses in high school.  This man had a beautiful
home, he was a Bata executive, he had this home with eight bedrooms.  He
had Arabians.  He used to show them all over the States, Florida and
everywhere.  My girlfriend and I looked after them, but this is
hilarious, right, we weren't allowed to ride them.  All we did was
exercise them and he'd come down on the weekend and ride them.  That's
the way he did things, that was fine.

"Anyway, this one time-like, we used to go down to the barn every day,
and this one time there were wolves.  I know what they look like,
wolves, and these were great big timber wolves.  I was surprised,
because we had seven dogs down there as well.  He had two big hounds, a
German shepherd, an Afghan, and some small dogs.  The dogs went crazy
and started barking.  So anyway we were stuck in the barn overnight, my
girlfriend and me and the dogs barking like crazy.  We were some scared.
And the next day I got a gun, I got a .3 08 and I know how to use it.  I
was going to shoot them.  But I didn't.  I just scared them away.  They
were just wolves.  ...

"Bob?  Are you still there?  Bob!"

"Uhn."

"I have a dog, too.  She's a husky.  Do you have any pets, Bob?"

Sue was interrupted by the beam of a flashlight being played over the
rag covering her face.

"Who's there?"

"John."

John was nice, he kept checking on them, letting them know they weren't
alone.  Sue sprinkled him with questions, as she always did.  Was there
any news?  Had they reached anyone on the radio?  Was rescue on the way?

There was really only one question-will I have my life back?-and John
couldn't answer that, so he didn't answer any of them.  He let her talk.

Sue moved from questions to observations ." It's colder, it must be the
middle of the night.  I know it all feels the same to you, John, but I'm
like a thermometer stuck here in the snow .

And an airplane went away and I haven't heard another one yet, except
the wind is so strong it could even be an airplane .

have you heard an airplane'john, have you heard the wind?"

"Help's on the way," he said.  'Everybody's doing their best.  You just
hang in there."

And then she moved from observations to despair .

Talking made her pain easier to bear, and I wish Bob would talk a bit
more, it would do him good.  But I'm really scared up here, I'm afraid
you're going to leave me.  And I know it's silly but I think you'll all
leave, and the rescuers will come and you'll forget about us, and you'll
all go away and leave us here.

"We wouldn't do that, Sue.  I'm going to stay right here beside you, so
that won't happen."

"And ...  I know nobody can tell me this, I already told Joe about it,
but I really don't think I can handle being in a wheelchair for the rest
of my life.  I mean, Adrian and I were going to buy a house, and I'm
thirty and I don't even have children yet.  And I know some people in
wheelchairs and they do all right, but it's not the same, not when
you're thirty and not even married yet and don't have any children.  And
I'm so alone, John, I'm so scared.  Why is this happening to me?"

She stopped talking then, because she was crying and her moans expressed
what her words could not.  She sobbed, and her sobs rose as fog to the
shroud over her face, and her wet breath mingled with her hopeless
tears.

John gently lifted the rag away, and they looked at each other, face to
face.  His face was dirty and soiled, and behind the charcoal his skin
appeared grey.  He had dark flaps under his eyes, and stubble on his
cheeks, and grey skin was hanging from his jowls.  He had aged terribly
with the cold.  He was suffering.

"I've got something," he said ." For you."

He fished a plastic-wrapped cube out of his pocket.  It took some doing.
His hands were trembling and nearly useless with cold.  He scraped at
the wrapper with nails that were blackened and fingers that were raw. It
was as though he had some kind of palsy.  He managed to get most of the
plastic off.

iso

"Open your mouth," he said.

"What is it?"

"Just open."

He pressed the cube against her lips.  His fingertips were ice, and her
lips trembled at the touch.  She felt the frozen cube enter her mouth.
It was hard and cold, but began to melt.  She had not realized how
hungry she had become .

Greedily she worked the sweet cube between her teeth.

"Don't chew it.  It's a survival candy.  Let it melt slowly."

Sue nodded, studying the ancient face of this young man.  He waited in
silence while she ate, squatting beside her, back to the wind.  He met
her eyes for a moment, then tucked his head between his knees.  He
seemed impossibly chilled, and he was bald.  God, you don't even have a
hat .

You shouldn't be outside.  But don't leave me.  ...

Couch got to his feet.  Sue watched with alarm, and he reassured her:
"I've just got to check on Bob."

He disappeared from her view, and she heard a low mumbling of voices.
After a few moments he returned and again squatted beside her.  He put
his face close to hers and said in a low tone, speaking to the ground,
"He's pretty bad."

Sue nodded.  She wanted to tell him that she was doing her best to keep
Bob awake, that she was grateful for his company in the wind and snow,
but the candy was so good she just sucked it greedily, like a baby at
the breast, watching his face.

"We didn't see it, you know."

She stopped sucking.  She looked puzzled.

"We didn't see the hills.  We didn't know a thing was wrong.  We just
...  crashed."

Sue wanted him to meet her eyes but he was in his own world.  He looked
up, turning his face to the storm and the darkness; then he dropped his
head between his knees.  She could no longer see his face, but he seemed
to be shivering uncontrollably.  His shoulders and back were heaving so
violently that someone who didn't know better might have thought he was
weeping.

Sue sucked the candy.  She would finish it and then tell John to go back
inside.  He needed a rest, he needed to take shelter from the cold, but
first she would finish the candy with him beside her.

They said nothing as the storm raged.  They remained in silence for
perhaps half an hour, until another flashlight lit the darkness.  It was
joe.  John always came first, then Joe followed.  Sue imagined he was
checking on John as much as on Bob and herself.  The beam of light
jerked across the snow as he made his unsteady way, picking out old
footprints, fighting the bitter wind.

"How's it going, Sue?"

" Okay."

Joe sat with Bob.  Sue could hear them talking but couldn't make out the
words.  Then she saw the sweep of his flashlight as he stood.  It caught
ice crystals in its beam, small barbs of ice driven horizontally across
the ground .

The light swung down as Joe made his way back to the tail.

Sue finished the candy.  It went like the last sliver of soap, getting
smaller and smaller without ever quite disappearing.  Finally it was no
more than a dot of sweetness on the roof of her mouth.

"I don't blame him, you know."

John looked up, startled.

"Joe, I mean.  I don't blame him.  I don't blame the pilot .

I know what it's like to fly an airplane.  I was an Air Cadet, I learned
to fly gliders.  Once we went to Ottawa in a Hercules, they let us into
the cockpit and I even got to fly it."

John said nothing.

"I know he must be feeling awful, but he's a good pilot .

Until we crashed I thought it was the best flight I'd ever been on.  All
sorts of things happen at night."

"Yes," he said ." They do."

" I mean, people make mistakes, but they're accidents.

That's why they call them accidents.  Nobody crashes an airplane on
purpose.  He was doing his best.  He probably feels awful, seeing us out
here.  But we don't blame him."

John was as still as a stone.  His expression hadn't changed, but water
had formed in the circles under his eyes.

"John?"

"You don't know, do you?"

"Know what?"

"My name is John Couch."

"I know," Sue laughed ." I'm Sue Hillier."

"I'm the pilot," said John, and wept.

His shoulders heaved and he sobbed loudly, and rocked slowly towards
her.  Grief had sapped his strength, and when he spoke again it was with
a different voice, frail and barely audible: "I'm sorry, I'm so very
sorry, sorry, sorry."

She wanted desperately to comfort him but she couldn't move.  She was
losing sensation in parts of her body, and her exposed face had become
so numb she felt foolish trying to speak, as she did after a visit to
the dentist, all goofy lips and rubber cheeks.

"Are you listening, John?"

His head moved, he was nodding yes.

"There's nothing to be sorry for.  There's nothing to forgive."

He met her eye for a moment.

"It was an accident," she said ." Nobody blames you .

I don't blame you, and look at me."

But he couldn't look at her.  He lifted his head again, gazing into the
teeth of the storm.  His eyes were closed.  He drew a shaky breath.

Me and my big mouth.  I never know when to shut up .

After all he's done for me, and now look what I've done.  I really hurt
him.

"Go now," said Sue ." Go back inside.  It'll work out .

They're going to come for us."

John draped the cloth over Sue's face, arranging it just so.  It wasn't
easy, with his frozen hands.  He got to his feet.

"I'll come back to see you, but I do have to go now.  I'll be no good to
anybody if I freeze to death."

In the tail of the wreckage, Wilma was also listening to the wind.  It
doesn't howl, she thought, doesn't moan.  It's just a pure sound of
rushing air.  She heard it ebb and flow, but there was no music to it;
it wasn't like the wind passing richly through the bellows of the organ
at the Church of the Brethren in Christ.  It was a dry sound.  Dry and
empty.

It didn't sound of this world at all; it sounded like it came from the
netherworld.  It would die down, and she would catch her breath; then it
would rise again.  It had a mind; it was evil.  It always seemed to rise
when a rescue plane approached.  She fancied that the Hercules brought
the wind; that its propellers angered the Arctic spirits and stirred up
the storm in their frenzy.

Huddled in the tail, a reeking den of blackness and injury and grief,
Wilma understood the elements as a personal enemy.  The survivors were
in the grip of some malevolent spirit.  Why else would the storm rage at
the approach of rescue aircraft?  Who else would want to drown out their
voices?

What other purpose was there in snatching their weak radio signals and
blasting them away in the storm?

"A plane,' said Vance.

Yes, it was there all right.  Wilma, too, could make out the engines'
approach.  Paul West scrambled for the tail opening, reaching in his
pocket for the hand radio he kept close to the warmth of his skin.  With
numb fingers he managed to pull out the aerial and scan the emergency
frequencies.

'...  Rescue Three Four Two,' a voice said ." Can you read me?"

"Loud and clear!" he shouted ." This is Sergeant Paul West!  I read you
guys!"

"This is Rescue Three Four Two.  We have you located, Paul.  What is the
number and condition of survivors, over."

"Get in here as quick as you can."

"We read you, Paul.  We can't get the jumpers in right now.  The
weather's too bad.  A ground party Of SARtechs are on their way.  What
is the number and condition of survivors, over."

"Fourteen,' West said ." Six red.  Six green.  Two yellow." Six
critically wounded, in need of immediate treatment.  Six stable.  Two in
need of early treatment and evacuation.

"You're breaking up, Paul.  Please repeat."

"The sooner you get in here, the better!"

"We've lost you, Paul.  Can't hear you.  Click your transmit button once
for affirmative, twice for negative .

Do you copy?  Over."

Dispirited, West clicked the transmit button .

"Okay.  Is there is more than one survivor?  Over."

Click.

"More than five?"

Click.

The voice on the radio sounded incredulous.  'More than ten?"

Click.

"More than fifteen?"

Click, click.

"Fourteen?"

Click.

"Okay, Paul.  Fourteen souls.  That's great.  We're going now to assist
the ground party.  Rescue Three Four Two over and out."

Paul raised his voice into the useless microphone: 'We really need you
guys!  We need you!'

No response; his batteries had died.  He returned to the row of
survivors, feeling their questions, wondering if he had got through.
When would help arrive?  He had no idea .

What had he actually learned?  Nothing.

"Relax", he said.  'I know these guys.  They'll be here as quick as they
can."

He lay down beside Wilma, pressed against her back .

In the few minutes outside, he had chilled considerably.  He began to
shiver uncontrollably.

"Ate you okay?" she asked.

"We've lost the radio," he said quietly ." There's a ground party on the
way.  Storm's too bad to jump."

The darkened tail fell into silence; West had attempted to reassure
everyone but had been short on specifics.  They knew he had made
contact, but they knew that already; the flares were a constant
reminder.  But West could not tell them what they wanted to know.  How
much longer must they endure?

Not knowing was a weight, one that some of the survivors almost couldn't
bear.  Wilma had an inspiration, the instinctive response of the
Christian through the ages; she would sing in the face of adversity.
Maybe the others would like to sing.  It might cheer everybody up.  What
would people know?  She began to hum the opening bars of "I'll Be Home
for Christmas."

"Not that," someone said.

Right, something happier.  She began to sing, in a tiny, thin, solitary
voice:

It's a long way to Tipperary,

It's a long way to go!

It's a long, long way to Tipperary,

My heart tells me so.

So hmm-hmm dee, dee dee dee dum dum,

Dee dum-dum, dee dum,

It's a long way to Tipperary,

It's a long waaay

To go!

She forgot the rest of the words, and stopped.  Echoes of the tune
resounded in the air.  Others were singing!

Okay, she could keep this going.  This time, her voice was robust:

I'm looking over

A four-leaf clover

That I've overlooked before!

A figure appeared in the opening of the tail section, darker black
against the blackness.  It was Joe.

"What's this?  A singsong?"

He picked his way carefully through the bodies, then took his place
beside Mario.  He moved as gently as he could, but Mario had to shift to
make room.  They all heard the grinding of Mario's broken hips, the
helpless, agonized moan.

" How are the others?" Wilma asked.

The two outside had become "the others," and those in the tail felt a
shared guilt at having left them in the snow .

They realized it was necessary but still felt remorse.  To some extent,
Joe and John had become their surrogates .

They all felt better when Joe and John were out there with them, even
though they knew the two crewmen suffered more with every trip.

There was no choice leading to less remorse or less pain; even the
singing increased the rate of dehydration through their lungs and sped
up the onset of hypothermia .

Wilma knew this, but she also knew that depression would take an even
greater toll.  She decided to add the singing to her roll call.

"Monty."

"Here."

Thank God.  Monty was having a lucid moment.  Because of his head
injuries, he drifted in and out.

"Where you from, Monty?"

"Can't you tell?" he said ." Newfoundland."

"Who knows a Newfoundland song?"

Someone began to sing, "This land is your land, this land is my land,"
believing there was something about Newfoundland in there somewhere.  It
was a good, rousing song, and most of them knew the words.

"What about Nova Scotia?" someone called.

Wilma began to sing "Farewell to Nova Scotia,' and nearly everyone
joined in.

"How about you, Super Mario?" she asked ." Where are you from?"

"Quebec," he said ." Born and raised in Bagotville.  Dad worked in the
paper mill.  Didn't speak a word of English till I joined the Forces."

"Hey," said another passenger, MarcTremblay.  'Same as me.  I was born
in Saint-Fdlicien.  Nine kids in our family .

Dad was a lumberjack, died when I was eight."

"Five in mine," said Mario ." You got kids?"

"Two.  Trevor, the boy, is nineteen.  Sigrid, the girl, she's fourteen.
Two's enough.  We stopped at two."

"I've got two, too," said Mario ." Girls.  Kelsy and Kayla.  My two
little sweethearts.  They're four and two."

"Little ones.  That's a good age.  That's the best time .

You going to stop at two?"

"I don't know."

"We did.  But you know, we were happy with nine in our family.  My
mother, she was poor moneywise, but she was rich in things you can't
replace with money.  We pulled together then.  A family was something.
All we had was each other." The tail was silent for a time.

"I'm afraid I don't know many songs from Quebec,' said Wilma, "but I
think everyone knows 'Frire Jacques." '

Mario led the version in French, then Wilma sang a chorus in Dutch, her
voice standing alone.  Then, while everyone was joining in a final
chorus in English, another figure darkened the lighter darkness of the
tail opening.

John's back was frozen solid with frost and ice; hunched and
slow-moving, he made his way in the darkness and lay down heavily, but
not among them, for there was no room .

He tucked himself as closely as he could to their feet.  He had stayed
too long in the cold this time; he would have to be more careful.
Perhaps he could warm himself by singing.  He joined in "Frire Jacques."

Their joined voices were waited on the wind to the burial site in the
snow.  Sue was alone again-she and Bob ,.%,ere alone again-and she
comforted herself by listening to the voices.  The other survivors
didn't seem so far away when they sang.  When the voices faded out, Sue
shouted at them to sing more, but the cloth was covering her face and
the wind was blowing towards her and they couldn't hear her voice.  She
was left with nothing but the howling of the wind and the echo of the
final roundelay:

Are you sleeping,

Are you sleeping,

Brother John?

Brother John?

Thin Ice

After the skidding hair-raising landing of the rescue Hercules from
Edmonton, Fred Ritchie had noticed his SARtechs studying the terrain at
Alert with unusual concentration.  They kicked at the rock and shale
under the thin coating of snow, gauged the bite of the wind.  Ritchie
could not command his men to jump; unlike most military personnel,
SARtechs work on mutual consent, not on orders.  They were sizing up
their chances in a jump.

At the command post Ritchie had found Major Don Hanson, who had asked
for a report.

"It's zero-zero visibility out there," Ritchie had explained ." We
couldn't establish ground contact.  What happened to the search party?"

Ritchie was told that the ground party had been turned back by
mechanical breakdowns and weather.  Reports from the circling Box Top
Hercules had indicated the presence of survivors, fire on the ground,
and what could have been the rudimentary makings of a camp.  But the
meteorological office could not forecast when the storm would blow over.
For the moment, the crash site was locked tight.

Ritchie decided to split his team Of SARtechs in two.  Half would get
some rest; the other six would go back up in the Herc with Burger to
circle the crash site, in case the weather cleared.  He explained the
new plan to Jim Brown, his team leader.

"Why don't we mount a ground search party?" said Brown.

"The vehicles are broken down, apparently.  They told us they had no
serviceable vehicles at the station."

"Then what are those, Fred?  Dinky toys?" Two of the yellow Go-Tracks
were parked inside the vehicle shed.

"Well, I'll be damned."

The two SARtechs hurried back to the command post .

Ritchie told Hanson he wanted to organize his own ground search.  He
needed volunteer drivers who knew the surrounding terrain.

The defeated ground search party had returned less than an hour earlier.
Steven Cann, the mechanic, hadn't even bothered to change out of his
Arctic kit; he'd headed straight for the Igloo Gardens base canteen to
make up for his missed supper.  It was now two o'clock in the morning,
and he hadn't had a meal since breakfast.  By the time he joined the
others at the command post, Fred Ritchie was studying a copy of the
station's 1:50,000 topographical survey of the area.

Another volunteer driver, Corporal Gilles Gregoire, said, "You'll never
make it across the Sheridan River.  We were out there.  We know."

Ritchie asked about heading for the coast and then following the pack
ice.

"Can't do that either,' Cann said.  "The Go-Tracks weigh nine tons a
piece.  There's air pockets under the ice this time of year, and
pressure ridges always.  Go through the ice, you're a dead man."

"All right,' said Ritchie ." We'll follow the coastline to here'-he
indicated an inlet just north of Cape Rawson, east of the crash
site-"then head inland.  We have a portable homer for the crash beacon.
When we get within range, we can follow the beacon to the site."

Ritchie's vehicle, Go-Track Six, took a toboggan kit with sleeping bags,
stoves, lanterns, tents, and fuel.  Ritchie sat in the front seat, with
Grgoire driving, and two SARtechs on a bench in the rear.  Cann drove
the other GoTrack, Bluebell, with three more SARtechs.

By the time they set off, the storm was, if anything, worse.  The
Go-Tracks had not gone 200 yards when the base disappeared behind them
in a fog of ice.  Had it not been pitch black, these would have been
white-out conditions.  As it was, snow and ice pellets whipped around
the headlamps of the Go-Tracks; Ritchie could not see five feet ahead of
him or twenty feet to the side.

"Okay, take us to the coast!" Ritchie yelled over the roar of the storm
and the machine.

" How?" Grigoire asked.

Nincompoop!  Imagine, driving the lead vehicle with no idea where you're
going.  Fred was ready to crawl down the man's gullet and ream him clean
through to the other end.  He knew how to do it, too: he'd been well
taught by his father, the regimental sergeant major.

"You don't know where we are?"

"I'm sorry, sir.  They don't allow us to use this road in winter. Nobody
on station knows this road."

"Why the hell did you volunteer, for Christ's-"

What am I doing?  I have nothing against this man; he volunteered while
others stood back.  What would the regimental sergeant major do in a
situation like this?  Of course, the regimental sergeant major would
never have got himself into a jam like this in the first place.  Only
his idiot son would do something like that.

"I know where we're going," Ritchie yelled.

"Yes, sir?"

"The crash site.  That's where we're going." He smiled at the man, and
at his own little joke.  "The only thing I don't know is how the hell to
get there."

"I know,' said Ron Burke, one of the SARtechs in back.

"How?" said Fred.

"By Hercules.  Definitely the way to get there."

"I sometimes forget," Ritchie told Gr6goire, 'how lucky I am to be
working with a bunch of frigging comics."

"The communications towers are east of here," said the driver ." They
have a flashing strobe on the top.  If we can get around the first
inlet, I think we could follow those to the coast."

Fred consulted the map; Gr6goire was right.  The route would take them
off the road, but even through the raging storm they ought to be able to
pick up the lights.  After that, well, they'd worry about it later.
Ritchie used his handset to talk with the Go-Track in the rear, and the
two-vehicle convoy turned blindly off the packed surface of the road .

The searchlight bounced erratically, and the jarring progress overland
registered in Fred's spine.  The ride was so brutally rough that Fred
wondered whether the shale would slice through their Kevlar-reinforced
treads.  Ah well, they'd find out soon enough.

The damned old regimental sergeant major, rest his soul.  Bursting
through the doors on Friday night, all starch and polish, even after a
week on exercise.  A week humping across the bush, and his boots were
clean; a man needs a shine on his boots and a razor across his face each
morning .

Not for the ladies, son, for the morale.  The infantrymen of the Queen's
Own Rifles, if common sense or a good Christian upbringing hadn't taught
them, learned such lessons quickly enough under the all-seeing gaze of
the regimental sergeant major.

Load the rucksacks and duffel bags into the station wagon, rain or
shine, summer or winter, day or night, didn't matter, then burn that
highway from Calgary to Baner.  Sometimes Fred wondered if the
regimental sergeant major ever slept in a bed.  What's this, a cold?
Mountain air will clean those sinuses.  Tummy trouble?  All that city
food .

Raining?  Won't have to rig up a camp shower, will we?

Bugs?  Let 'em bite.

Every weekend, year round.  A man and his boy.  A man and his little
man.  A sergeant major and his troop.  Fred humped the rucksacks,
climbed up the mountain trails, let the bugs bite and the shoulders burn
until he hit the dizzying emancipation of the tree line, and all God's
country spilled out before him like a drink of sweet alpine water.  He
loved the woods and the mountains despite the old man.  And how many
boys were lucky enough to spend every goddamn weekend in the mountains
with their fathers?

And then he hit sixteen, and neither the law nor the regimental sergeant
major could keep him in school.  Fred became dust on the trail, kicking
around here and there.  As long as there is drunkenness and youth, there
will always be tattoo parlours and recruitment centres, and Fred woke up
one morning and found himself an able seaman in the Royal Canadian Navy.

The navy, for Christ's sake.

Fred went to sea on Her Majesty's Canadian Ship Cape Scott, but the
regimental sergeant major caught up with him every mail call, letting
him know it wasn't good enough to be mucking about on boats, he was
bigger than that, he had infantry in his bloodline.  The regimental
sergeant major had such high ambition for the boy that Fred felt
slothful and unimportant, even thought of lying for a while, maybe let
the old man think he was doing something worthy, like naval battery.

But the regimental sergeant major would know, so Fred wrote back,
summoning every ounce of respect he could into the title of naval
storesman.  It fell several grains short on the old man's balance.  A
storesman?  A clerk?  Had the regimental sergeant major raised him to be
a penscratcher?  Oh, the fatherly concern.  Here, son.  Here's some
fingerless gloves, in case the stores are damp.  Remember to bend your
knees when you lift.  And whatever you do, don't cut yourself on a
quill.

"Light, Fred!  Up there!"

Ritchie peered out, rubbing condensation off the window.  It was pitch
black and the shrieking wind was fierce,

driving slivers of ice almost horizontally through the lights of the
Go-Tracks.  Faintly, through the storm, he could see the red glow of a
flashing beacon.

GrEgoire nodded, grinning, and pulled the right tiller bar; the Go-Track
jerked around on its tread and headed off in the direction of the light
." Shewon'the far'notinthis weather!  Probably just a hundred yards, by
the height of her."

"Then we're a hundred yards off course,' said Fred .

"And those towers aren't more than a few hundred yards from the sea
ice."

"Yes, sir.  Sorry, sir."

"Well, thank Christ you've got a sense of direction.  I'd have put us in
the ocean by now."

"Thanks, sir."

"Fred.  The name is Fred."

Grdgoire used the throttle pedal, and the Go-Track, following the series
of lights, made its bone-jarring way down a gradual slope to the
coastline.  The jolting diminished as chunks of shale gave way to finer
stones and powder near the shore.

They had reached Sickle Point, Fred reckoned, a spit of land jutting
into the west side of Ravine Bay.  The bay was shaped like a lagoon,
with Sickle Point on the west side, extending across the mouth of the
bay.  It came within a mile of Mushroom Point, shaped as its name
suggested, which lay to the east.  These two points nearly close the
mouth of the bay.  Okay.  From Mushroom Point they'd follow the
coastline east around the right shoulder of Ellesmere Island and down to
the unmistakable gorge of the Sheridan River estuary.  From there,
they'd wing it.

In the blackness, the convoy traced the southern shore of the bay,
relying on the smoother surface to tell them they were on course.  From
time to time, rocks jolted the vehicle and Gr6goire nudged the tiller
bar to the left, correcting their route.  In this manner, navigating
blindly, they rounded the inside of Mushroom Point and changed
direction.  The cap of the mushroom curves west, towards the mouth of
the bay; they followed this course.  Then the point turns sharply back
on itself and veers right, to the east.

Fred kept waiting for Mushroom Point to show up .

The Go-Track's heater sent a blast of warmed air over his feet.  It had
been more than twenty-four hours since he had last slept.  His dreamy
eyes drooped; perhaps he nodded off .

When he next focused his gaze out the windscreen he thought: Good.
There's Mushroom Point straight ahead.

There was a form rather like a mushroom, about the size of an iceberg,
taking shape in the white-out ahead of them.

just a minute!  Mushroom Point looks like a mushroom when viewed on a
map, not when viewed out the window .

Ritchie's mind raced as the white object materialized in the gloom. That
was a pressure ridge formed by the grinding collision of two sheets of
pack ice.  It was about a half-mile long and 200 feet high, and formed
entirely of frozen water.

They must be headed vaguely in the direction of the North Pole, driving
over the ice pack.  Concerned with correcting their travel to the left,
they must have shot off the end of Mushroom Point, unaware they were
passing over the frozen surface of Ravine Bay.  The convoy was
unwittingly proceeding at top speed in a direction exactly opposite to
the crash site, over the open waters of the Lincoln Sea.

.We're on the ice!" Fred shouted.  'Get us out of here!' GrEgoire,
veering right, swung the Go-Track around .

Fred, reaching for the handset, noticed a dark patch looming large
directly ahead of the vehicle.  They weren't more than a few feet from
it when Fred recognized the black streak.

"Open water!  Turn left!"

Grdgoire swung back, doinga 180-degreeturnoverthe ice.  'This way?"

"I don't know!  just go back!  Back!"

Black clouds of diesel exhaust belched out the overhead stacks of the
Go-Track.  Gr6goire pushed the clanking vehicle to top speed.

Steven Cann, driving the second vehicle, saw the lead truck kick up a
bow wave, which rippled towards him on the salt ice.  They were on a
frozen trampoline.  The ice was resilient enough to take their combined
weight of eighteen tons.  He cut throttle and pulled his Go-Track back
and to the left, spreading their weight over the surface.

It was suddenly quiet in the land vehicle.  Fred felt a pang of remorse.
The SARtechs in the rear scraped the ice condensation from the
windshields and pressed their faces against the glass, looking for signs
of land or, worse, openings in the ice.  Visibility was about
twenty-five feet, which would not provide much warning either way.

Damn fool he was, with three sons of his own not yet raised.  Poor Pam.
What the hell was he trying to prove?  At least it'll be quick, he
thought.  When the ice buckles, it'll be over in one cold, black
explosion.

Pam was auburn-haired and lovely, a strong woman, but gentle with him,
and it was a hot summer, and he was a father by age twenty.  The
regimental sergeant major conveyed his congratulations.  Reference: Your
decision to raise a family.  You're all set now to raise children,
aren't you, now that you have a naval career?  Now that you have a
future as a storesman.

Fred had been at sea the first years, then had taken a posting at
Downsview; and the regimental sergeant major had conveyed his delight
that his son had found a mariner's trade in the famous port city of
Toronto.

And the night he'd lain in Pam's arms, and told her he was going to be a
SARtech, and she didn't know the word .

He explained: the mountain climbing, the parachuting, the outdoors. They
pay you for it, Pammie.

And what else, Fred?

Well, with my education I'll never be a brain surgeon, you know that,
I'll never be a doctor; but what they teach you, Pammie, it's pretty
damn close.  I'll be helping people .

I never dreamed in my life I'd be able to help people like that.

And what else, Fred?

And I'm ashamed, Pam.  I'm ashamed of my life.

Oh, how the regimental sergeant major had flung wide his arms to welcome
the prodigal son!  They were reconciled; well, he was reconciled to his
son.  All was forgiven, all the regimental sergeant major's work had
paid dividends.  See this young fellow?  Mark that boy.  He's a search
and rescue technician.  Know what that means?  He's a para-rescue
specialist.  He saves lives.  He'd crawl through fire to save your
pretty bottom, my sweet.  Know what else?

He's my son.

And then the regimental sergeant major had passed away, proud of his
son; and the son was proud of his father, and respectful of the
memories.  Those who knew him noticed how alternately impatient and
respectful he was with the small people, and how insubordinate with the
commissioned ranks.  He was his father's son, all right, and a SARtech
made.

" Lights, Fred!  Ahead!"

Sure enough, the red strobes of the communication towers cut through the
storm.  The two Go-Tracks had hit the coastline south of Sickle Point,
traveling in the opposite direction to what Fred had imagined.  He
radioed the GoTrack in the rear; they were down to half fuel.  There was
little choice but to follow the lights and make for the polar station.

Fred checked his watch.  By the time they returned to base, they would
have wasted more than seven hours .

Good buddies out there, injured and freezing.  Christ, was it only two
weeks ago he and Couch had flown a rescue mission' , Seven hours of
stumbling around like blind mice .

There had to be a better way.

Fred's watch was not the regulation army watch: SARtechs, when they
graduate from training, are issued an expensive Rolex.  Most wear it
only to formal occasions at the mess.  For fieldwork, the only thing it
has going for it is water resistance.  Most SARtechs find their own
watches, compete with one another to score the Japanese gadget with the
greatest number of bells and whistles.  Fred had picked up an
inexpensive Casio in a jewelry store in Edmonton.  It was magic.  It was
shock-resistant and waterproof to several atmospheres.  It had a
tachymeter, lap timer, time zone function, and alarm.  It also had a
barometric altimeter.  He could use it skydiving, scuba diving, or
mountaineering; it was accurate to within fifty feet.

In the humid racket of the Go-Track, he consulted his topographic
survey.  The contour intervals on the map marked altitude in gradations
of fifty feet.  If he compared his watch's reading with the map, he
could determine his location within two contour lines.  At the least, he
would know whether they were moving inland or over the ocean.

That gave him location, more or less.  What about bearing?  The Go-Track
bumped and jerked over the rocky terrain.  Fred peered out the steamy
side window.  The snow had been whipped into regular ridges by the wind,
much as a desert storm ripples the sand.  The ridges would be at right
angles to the wind direction.  By radioing the weather office at Alert,
he could find out the bearing of the prevailing wind; the ridges would
give him a rough idea of his relation to that course.

The Go-Tracks were within a half-mile of Alert but could not find the
station.  Keeping the tower lights to their rear, they edged around the
coastline of Parr Inlet, the last landmark between themselves and the
base.  Then the terrain became flat, and they lost any guiding contours.
More than once they crossed their old tracks at right angles.

Give it up, Fred.  You think you're going to navigate ten nautical miles
through white-out by reading a cheapjack Casio watch and the spoor of
the wind?  A dozen souls out there in the snow, and you're going to find
them when you can't even find a polar station with a fully lit airfield
a half mile away?  You're going to get these people killed, Fred.

"You're awful quiet,' said Ron Burke, a ginger-haired SARtech from Cape
Breton and one of Fred's closest friends.

"Frustrated."

"We gave 'er our best shot."

Fred nodded.  They were following their own track now; there was a
50-percent chance it would take them towards the station, not away from
it.  Ron was a good man, smart-ass though he was.  By Hercules, Fred.
Definitely the way to get there.

Hercules!  Christ, why hadn't he thought of it?  He snatched the radio
and hailed the rescue centre at the base.

"Don, can you get us a Herc?"

What do you have in mind?" said Hanson.

"I think I've figured out a way to get there, if I can see where I'm
going.  Get me some top cover and get me some flares.  I don't need
illumination, I need a target.  We can spot the flares and get a
bearing."

"You got it.  I'll coordinate with Rescue Three Zero Five and Three Four
Two."

"If we can spot the flares, we'll get a bearing."

"Just like the three wise men, huh?"

"No,' said Fred ." Just like one wise man."

In truth, the regimental sergeant major would never have got into a jam
like this.  But he'd bequeathed his son the savvy and grit to find a way
out.

Legs

Bob Thomson heard music.  He heard singing, sweetly raised voices.  He
was in a beer garden.  Elaine was with him .

The sun was shining off her golden hair; she was tanned and smiling.
They'd been on their bikes.  Legs.  She had on the blue spandex biking
shorts he liked so much, and the pale blue halter top.  Her skin
glistened, and there was a sheen of sweat on her shoulders.  It formed a
little pool in the dimple of her collarbone.  He wanted to press his
mouth against its wetness.  The sun was shining.  They were in Germany.

"Bob."

No!  Shut up!

He was in Germany, and he wanted to press his mouth against her wetness.

"Bob!"

Not this woman.  He did not want this woman he could not see, could not
touch, could not drink the wetness from.

"Uhn."

"Just grunt, Bob.  Grunt so I know you're here."

Here.  Why would he want to be here in the frigid dark?

He was in the dark, an intruder, a spy, tucked away in the back tables
of clubs like the Lion d'Or and the Top Hat in Montreal, watching his
father play the lounge piano.  His father's legs reached down to the
pedals, but how they pitched the sound of the jazz he couldn't tell.  He
was tone deaf, he'd never follow in his father's footsteps-legs-but his
dad had shown him how to keep time, with his feet.

He'd left college on account of his legs, on account of how they felt
dancing over the ski slopes of the Laurentians .

He'd humped groceries at Loblaws on the midnight-tomorning shift and
skied all day.  He and Bob Tait bought a ski cottage together.  He like
bachelor life, liked being a ski bum.  And he'd worked his way up from
stacking shelves to designing the displays, and the next thing he was
renovating old stores, then opening new ones.  The grocery business was
changing fast, and Loblaws was blazing the trail.  Bob was becoming a
cog in the food distribution machine; he found himself working with a
calculator, while his waist thickened and his legs atrophied.  Then Tait
had gone and joined the Forces and got posted to Lahr.  He'd sent back
postcards: Zermatt, Grindelwaid, Gstaad.  Having a great time.  Wish you
were here.  Bob was jealous as hell.  He quit Loblaws and joined CANEX.

It took him four years, but he'd finally got the job running the CANEX
in Lahr.  And Elaine had gripped his arm as the airplane descended over
the Alps, and told him he was wonderful, it would be the honeymoon
they'd never had; and he thought, Eat your heart out, Bob Tait, I'm
living my dreams.  They'd taken their belated honeymoon that March, in
Grindelwald on account of the skiing, on account of his legs.  They had
stayed at the Hotel Belvedere, and Elaine had stepped out on the balcony
in the mornings with the sun streaming through her gown; and she was
loveliness, and he had told her it was warm under the duvet: Come.  And
the Andermatt on the St.  Gotthard Pass, Christmas with the shutters
open at night, the moon shining from the snow and through their open
window .

The blue nights, with the stars watching in delight.  Legs.

The last summer they had bicycled through Provence .

Legs.  They drank wine and inhaled the heady air of the cheese shops,
broke baguettes and uncorked bottles and spent long afternoons in the
sun.  The trusting-place by the

river, where he had described the course of her cheek, her jaw, and her
bare collar with a twig; she rose above him, and he embraced her.

Legs.

His left heel was pressed against his shoulder, just under the ear.

"Bob, can you talk?"

"Uhn?"

"I'm scared."

It was painful to talk; the effort brought a gripping pain to his lower
back.  He had to speak against the wind, nearly shouting so that Sue
could hear him, although they were only a body length apart.

"What of?"

"They've gone.  I can't hear them any more."

"Don't be stupid."

"I am not stupid."

It had only been ...

Bob didn't know how long it had been.  Half an hour?

Maybe a few hours.  Three or four hours, tops.  Six?  You're losing your
mind, Thomson.

"They were just here." 'It was last night.  Now they've gone, I can feel
it." Joe had stayed with him the first hours, maybe the first day.  Then
he had gone away and come back.  Away and back.  And again.  Again.
Again?

"They're gone.  They've left us here."

"They're not gone."

"I read about it once, in the papers," Sue said, her swollen tongue and
the freezing cold making it ludicrously difficult .

"They left a guy in Arizona.  The Army had left this guy at an
intersection and he was left there, and he died.  It happens."

Bob remembered the story.  It was the National Guard, not the Army; and
it was in New Mexico.  And the Gulf War, there were lots of stories of
lost platoons in the Gulf War, weren't there?  He could see how it
happened.  The arrival of the rescuers, everyone ecstatic, bundled up,
and away they went.  Then, maybe tomorrow, they'd remember the two
civilians.  ...

"They've abandoned us.  Oh my God I can't breathe .

They've abandoned us, Bob, we're abandoned and we're going to die."

"It's okay to die."

"Okay, but I don't want to go out like some crazy woman, I'm suffocating
in here, they've buried us alive and forgotten us, and now I'm going to
die.  I'd rather die than go crazy like this."

Bob listened to the wind, picked out the drone of a Hercules through the
rasping howl.  The others were being taken to Alert, he realized, given
blankets and hot chocolate and warmth on the Hercules, which was, at
that moment, flying over his shrouded face.

Get a grip on yourself, Thomson.

Sue was screaming ." The planes!  That's them, that's them!"

This is the military, Thomson.  They'd never do anything like that.
Leave civilians in the snow to die.

"They've gone, I know it, we're going to die!' "Oh, for Christ's sake!
Will you just shut up?" 'Shut up, why shut up?  They've gone, Bob, we're
abandoned, we're going to die, we're buried alive.  They won't find our
bodies till spring, and my mother, it'll kill my mother when they find
our bodies, and the animals will have eaten us because they've gone and
abandoned-' "Deal with it, all right?"

"Bob?"

"Look, lady, I've got enough on my plate without having to deal with
you.  They're trying to get to us.  We're either going to make it or
we're not.  Deal with it, all right?

just fucking deal with it and shut the fuck up!'

Bob's head swam with the exertion.  Something was sending hot daggers
into places he did not know pain could reach.  Panting like an animal,
he felt his head sink back deeper into the icy grip of the snow.

Cold is cruel; it only becomes kind at the edge of death .

At first it is a great amplifier of pain.  People with minor wounds
become incapacitated when the pain is combined with cold; severe cold
drops them in their tracks.  Cold paralyzes its victims and then, like a
venomous hunter, anaesthetizes them.  In deep cold, the body pulls the
heat away from the extremities and into the vital organs of heart,
lungs, and brain.  The exposed limbs succumb to cold.

Freezing is much like burning; the sensations are similar, but the
effects on the body are different.  Cold kills one cell at a time.  The
water inside the cell expands as it freezes, and bursts the cell walls;
the flesh, the connective tissue, the nerve bundles, all explode at the
freezing point under the bursting shells of cold.  This is called
frostbite: the Arctic kiss.  With the death of the nerves comes the
death of pain, the precursor of death itself.

Bob was not yet numbed by the cold.  It consumed him, or rather pain
consumed him, and the cold made him unaware of anything but his pain. He
felt no remorse at his outburst; he had withdrawn into himself and his
pain.  Pain marked the boundaries of his consciousness and his desire .

Pain was his morality and his will.

His breathing did not subside; he breathed hard, and his shoulders rose
away from the ice and heaved into the pain.  It was dripping wet inside
his shroud; the condensation was building.  He had a relationship, other
than one of pain, with only one part of his body: his right hand.  It
rested near his right cheek, and he could move it about six inches in
either direction.  His breath had kept the fingers from freezing.  They
were wet.  He was breathing fog.  He was suffocating.

He inched the hand up to the edge of the tarpaulin and tugged it. Drafts
of cold air swept over him, and he gulped .

Soon he felt better; the air inside the tent was drier.  He felt better
for a time, and then he thought he heard the sound of scratching.

It was not the scratching of the wind over the dry crust of ice but a
methodical, animated pawing.  An animal was at work.  Legs.  He heard
himself breathing, and then he heard a breathing that was not his own.
He was alone and then he was no longer alone.  There was a beast in the
blackness.

He pulled the tarpaulin shroud closed, barely daring to breathe.  Maybe
it won't see me.  Maybe it won't know we're here.

" Bob.  Bob?  Hear that?"

"Uhn?"

"There's an animal outside."

"Just the wind."

"No, it's an animal, a wolf or a bear or something.  Oh my God, we're
going to get eaten alive."

"Quiet."

He heard her whimpering, but she said no more.  He listened to the
pawing sound.  The sound was working its way along the piled snow the
length of Bob's body; it paused at his head.

Stay calm, Thomson.  You've got the tarp over your face.  Probably just
an arctic fox ...

The animal had stopped moving.  Bob could hear it breathe on the other
side of the tarpaulin, inches from his face.  It was panting lightly. He
was panting.

If he comes through the tarp, Thomson, he's going to go for your face.
You'll feel his fangs slice into your face .

You'll feel his saliva and the rasp of his tongue as he tears off your
face.  Can you live with that, Thomson?  He moved his right hand,
furtively, to the snow around his head.  His fingers probed the snow,
looking for some object.  They fell upon a cold piece of metal.  It felt
like a sharp bar, about the size of a candy bar.  One end was twisted
and ragged.

Polar bears don't often come this far north.  Hey, Thomson, it's
probably an arctic hare!  You're shit-scared over an arctic hare.  A
bunny rabbit.

The beast pawed at the tarpaulin over Bob's face, then began to scratch
away at it.  Bob felt a heavy paw against his face, and the dragging of
claws against the heavy fabric.

A wolf.  It's an arctic wolf and it's going for your face .

Way to go, Thomson.  Your back is broken, you're paralyzed and freezing
to death, and a wolf is going to chew off your face.

He tightened his grip on the metal bar.

The paw pressed heavily against his face.  The beast was now stepping
over him, towards Sue.  He heard her panicked whimpering, and the
scratching noise of the wolf pawing at the snow.

Which was worse?  To be eaten alive, or to listen, paralyzed, as she was
being eaten alive?  The question was beyond answering; beyond
comprehension.

"Bob,' she cried ." Oh

There was quiet.

"Sue!'

She was blubbering, her voice the voice of an anguished child, hurt
beyond understanding, beyond hope, beyond caring, a voice naked and
nearly drowned by tears.

"It's gone away.  Ohhh."

"Uhn."

"Don't leave me, Bob.  I need you.  Talk to me.  just talk to me."

And so Bob told her about Elaine, and her beauty; and about his work,
and Germany, and his bike, and skiing, and what the Alps looked like in
winter.  And he told Sue that she was the most irritating woman he had
ever met, and that she had kept him going back then, when he was about
to pack it in.  And he told her that he needed her, too .

And when she had stopped crying they both fell silent, and contemplated
the darkness, and listened for sounds in the storm.  They no longer
clung to concepts of time, or of distance, or even of rescue.  The time
was night.  Their place was an ice coffin.  The end would arrive through
death or deliverance.

Bob no longer thought of his home, or the south, or the shoulders of
Elaine.  His mind simply kept track of his own body, in the most simple
terms.  You're still awake, Thomson .

You're not asleep.  You can breathe.  The hand works .

You're still awake, Thomson.

If it were to be death, so be it.  He would go if it came time to go.
But he would not let it happen by itself.  He knew he could turn off a
switch at any time-that's how he thought of it, a simple switch-and he
would go.  But he wouldn't do that, because there didn't seem to be any
point.  He would watch instead, wait and see which form his salvation
would take.

"Bob?  "

"What?"

"I hear wolves.  I hear them having."

SARhirds

The smoking shed by Five Hangar at the Edmonton base resembles the
interrogation rooms of Eastern Europe.  A naked light bulb swings
overhead.  There are metal folding chairs, an ashcan, and a rotating
fan.  To Major Don Blair, the setting was appropriate; he felt as though
he'd been worked over for days.  He took a long drag on his Player's,
burning it down to his knuckles.  Then he lit another.

Blair held a sheaf of teletype and telephone messages that charted the
emotional upheavals of the past twenty-four hours.  Yes, it had been a
shock in the beginning, but at least there had been a sense of purpose
and a feeling of progress.  Then the rescue centre had learned of souls
still alive, and there had been a quiet euphoria, even a
lightheadedness.  Then the souls began to suffer in the storm, and the
rescue centre suffered with them.  Now all of Blair's efforts had turned
to sand in his fingers.  He felt like crying as he leafed through the
papers:

Crash plus thirteen hours: Discovery.  'Command Post Alert advises
Rescue 342 has made contact with crash site on 282.8UHFvia a series of
clicks,

indicating at least 10 survivors."

Crash plus thirteen thirty: Astonishment.  'Command Post Alert advises
Resc 342 reports at least 14 survivors."

Crash plus fifteen thirty: Anxiety.  'Command Post Alert advises Resc
342 re-established voice contact with survivors who advised there are
multiple injuries and frostbite setting in."

Crash plus seventeen hours: Dread.  'Command Post Alert updates that as
of 31114oz survivors have taken refuge in fuselage and some are in
critical condition."

And there were all the rebuffed advances:

"Thule Bell 212 returned to Thule due bad weather."

"Ground search party stranded between Mann Bay and Cape Sheridan due
whiteout conditions."

"Helo resources Elmendorf AFB may take 2 days arrive at scene."

"Twin Otter diverted to Eureka due weather."

"Rescue 301 CH113 Labrador origin Gander

forced landing position 5655N 6635w stranded due bad weather."

"Rescue452 cel 15 Buffalo returningtokuujiuaq unserviceable and
non-repairable."

"Second attempt ground search party with 435 Sqn SARtechs returned to
station due whiteout conditions."

Such a promising start.  At first the wall chart of the rescue centre
had barely been able to hold all the air resources tasked to the rescue.
The wall map had been marked with black lines, all inching their way up
the board .

Then the air resources had been crossed out with blue lines, striking
out aircraft that had been stood down.  Damn weather.  The weather
seemed to have taken a personal and vindictive interest in the rescue.

By the latest weather report, the ceiling at Alert was 700 feet, or some
300 feet lower than the crash site.  The survivors were socked in, and
SARtechs needed a 2,000-foot ceiling above ground for a night parachute
jump.  The winds were twenty-five to thirty-five knots, above
operational limits for takeoff and landing, let alone for the SARtechs.
In blowing snow, they couldn't jump in wind speeds of more than ten
knots.

The temperature was steady at -22 Celsius.  As a rule of thumb, Blair
knew, wind chill temperature is calculated by doubling the temperature
and adding the wind.  Must be down around -70 degrees.  At that
temperature, which meteorologists classify as 'extremely cold,' skin
freezes within thirty seconds of exposure to the air.  Heat is drawn
from the body at an alarming rate; an exposed person moves rapidly from
shivering to stupor to death.  The survivors had been out there
twenty-four hours.  They certainly wouldn't last another day.  They
wouldn't last many more hours.

Blair had arranged for a field surgery to be established at Alert.  He
made a note to arrange for a coroner and a morgue as well.  Hope for the
best, plan for the worst.

His nicotine addiction satisfied for the moment, Blair returned to the
base rescue centre.  There was a small crowd of people outside the door;
they all turned to him.  Many were the duty officers assigned to assist
the families of crash victims; some were family members themselves.  He
knew the names of some of the wives.  People crowded around as he
reached the locked door to the rescue centre.  He mumbled an apology and
gently shouldered his way through.  Sorry.  Nothing new to report. We're
trying our best.  Excuse me.

He used his pass key to enter the room.  After the hubbub outside, the
rescue centre was oddly silent.  Halfempty cups of coffee had been left
here and there.  People tapped pencils on desktops, rubbed their tired
faces.  It was a dispirited place.  The sense of impotence and
frustration had banished all optimism from the room.

The base commander, Colonel Mike Wansink, was standing at the wall
charts.

"What did I forget?  " Blair asked.  'What can we do that we haven't
done?"

"Nothing more to be done,' said Wansink ." Except pray for a break in
the weather." When a technician brought over the latest bulletin, Blair
imagined more bad news.  Another plane grounded?

But no: on the wall chart the technician extended one of the black lines
a few inches farther up the map.  This line, unlike all the others, was
continuing to move north.  The technician placed a stick pin at the top
of the line, with a paper flag on the pin.  The flag read: "Resc 315."

At Kuujjuaq, on Quebec's northern coastline, the yellow tail of Rescue
315 rose off the flight deck.  After a quick hot refuelling of the
aircraft and a radio call to the Edmonton rescue centre, Captain Mark
Levesque was back at the controls with instructions to proceed in his
Labrador helicopter to the fuel dump at lqaluit, 400 miles farther
north.  The flight would take him over the icy waters of Ungave Bay, to
the high black cliffs of the Meta Incognita Peninsula on the southeast
shore of Baffin Island, over the peninsula to Frobisher Bay, then up the
channel to lqaluit.

Levesque was taking off without top cover.  The Buffalo aircraft that
had flown top cover on his first leg had broken down, and a Hercules had
been diverted to deadhead the spare crew for the Labrador up the line;
Iqaluit was the last airfield on his flight path before Alert.  Levesque
cursed every extra minute on the ground, knowing it would store up
against his fatigue in flight.  But the down time had paid off: he'd
managed to contact one of the Aurora surveillance aircraft from
Greenwood.  The Aurora crew had agreed to intersect the Labrador's
flight path.  Levesque would begin to get navigational assistance from
the Aurora somewhere enroute; he risked flying blind until then.

Levesque had filed a routine flight plan, but that was a mere formality.
There would be no need to mount a rescue effort if they made a forced
landing over Ungave Bay.  The Labrador's inability to maintain flight on
a single engine poses an unacceptable risk, but it's a risk that has
become commonplace.  Levesque took the helicopter to 500 feet and set
off northward.  The northern shore of the continental land mass fell
away beneath him.

The nose of the Labrador had barely touched the humid air over Ungave
Bay when ice began to form on the windscreen and a SARtech in the rear
called, 'Ice on the sponsons " Ice on the sponsons meant there was also
ice on the engine vents.  Levesque felt as though the elements were
maliciously seeking him out, as though something was determined to coat
his aircraft in ice and bring down all hands.

His instinct was to climb again, but he recalled his experience of
maritime flight when he'd been posted with the rescue unit in Gander.
The pilots there often spoke of a thermal layer just at the ocean's
surface.  You had to dig down to find it, but it made sense.  It all
depended on the temperature of the bay; salt water turns to ice a few
degrees below the freezing point.  There was no guarantee, but he
decided it was the better risk.

Levesque and his crew had enough light to see the surface of the water,
but it is difficult to estimate height over water, so he kept his eyes
on the dials.  He decided to lose altitude, all the way down to surface
level if necessary .

If the thermal layer did not exist, he'd at least be in a better
position to ditch.

At eighty feet, the ice was still gaining mass and the temperature was
unchanged.  No change at seventy feet, or sixty.  The Labrador was down
to fifty feet-the length of one rotor blade-before it found the thermal
layer.  The outside temperature abruptly rose four degrees, and the
dimpled ice on the windscreen began to melt away.  He checked with his
flight engineer: the engines were breathing easily.  So was Levesque.

He continued the dash northward, skipping above the surface of Ungave
Bay and entering the Hudson Strait .

When he crossed the 60th parallel the light began to fail; the aircraft
was soon flying in utter darkness.  It would not see daylight again. The
magnetic deviation increased; so did the distance from navigational
aids.  This went unnoticed by the flight crew until they turned to their
instruments

when approaching the cliffs of Baffin Island in the failing dark.

To clear the cliffs Levesque began a climb to 6,000 feet .

Even his instruments seemed to confirm the conspiracy against him.  The
Omega navigational system senses radio signals sent skyward from ground
stations at fixed locations around the world and uses them to
triangulate a position.  The Omega told Levesque that Iqaluit was 90
degrees to his right.  The automatic direction finder, which was homing
in on the lqaluit radar beacon, pointed in the opposite direction, 90
degrees to his left.  Levesque's own gut feeling told him to plow
straight ahead.

The navigational aids were worthless.  The Labrador could have avoided
the confusion by setting its compass to work from the directional
gyroscope.  But there was a ban on using the gyro in northern latitudes,
because it was known to be unreliable.

As it turned out, the gyro in the Labrador had been installed with its
polarity reversed.  Had Levesque reached behind the unit and switched
the polarity, the machine would have behaved as if it were flying
towards the South Pole and given a reliable bearing.  No one thought of
such a solution; it was too simple.

Because they were flying through darkness without navigational aids, the
crew members were unaware that they were being pushed by winds of
seventy-five knots on their left beam.  Their forward air speed was
registering at ninety knots, but their progress had been reduced to a
crawl.  They were flying crab-like to the right-past the eastern tip of
Baffin Island and out over the Labrador Sea .

There was no landfall ahead of them until Greenland, which was well
beyond the helicopter's endurance.

Levesque flew on in darkness, using his own sense of direction rather
than the instruments.  When he peered out the windscreen, he saw only
the reflection of his own instrument panel.  When he looked at the
panel, the only instrument of any use was the altimeter.  His internal
compass had given him the most accurate reading of any instrument on
board; the nose of the Labrador was on target.  But the wind-blown
aircraft was drifting 45 degrees off course.

Levesque was intent on this course, waiting to catch sight of cliffs
that would never appear, when a voice came over his headset.

"Rescue Three One Five, this is your Aurora top cover.

just where the hell you going, buddy?" 'Aurora, we have no navaids and
I'm not picking up Frobisher.  Can you give us some steers out of here?"
"Will cooperate.  Stand by."

The radar operators used the Aurora's sensors to paint an image of the
Labrador over terrain, then used this image to calculate a bearing.

"Rescue Three One Five, set course two niner true." 'Aurora, you don't
understand.  Don't give me magnetic steering, because my compass is
spinning around.  Don't give me a course, because I have no gyro.  Give
me a steer." 'Okay.  Turn left about forty-five degrees." Forty-five
degrees?  Was it possible they were so far off course?  Levesque drew a
slow breath at -the near miss; without the Aurora, they would have died
in the frigid waters below.

At least now we've got top cover, he thought.  Now we've got it licked.
In the midst of his exhilaration, the windscreen began to whiten with
wet, sticking snow.  The new course was taking them back into a snow
shower .

Back into the ice.  Suckered again.

By now the strain of flying in a continual hands-on posture for more
than three hours was showing.  Levesque's shoulders were in knots, his
neck was stiff, his hands were aching.  He had to think through the
fatigue.  The snow was glazing into ice on the windscreen.  He couldn't
descend, not with the cliffs hovering in the distance.  He would have to
climb again, and hope ...

He could use the Aurora!

"Aurora, we're picking up ice at six thousand.  Think you can do some
pathfinding for us?  Find us some dry air?" The Aurora climbed and dove
ahead of the Labrador, its sensors sampling the air: "Three One Five,
you'll find it nice and cosy at nine thousand."

Levesque climbed.  He knew he was reaching altitude by the dials and by
the growing sloppiness of the aircraft .

In the soggy handling at 9,000 feet, and crosswinds that nearly matched
the aircraft's forward airspeed, the Labrador was swimming around the
air current like a speeding car on ice.  Levesque fought the fog in his
mind as he struggled to stay cognizant.  He was stretching his body's
limits, and he knew it.

We'll change crew in lqaluit.  just have to make Iqaluit .

Soon we'll lock onto the beacon.  I'll follow the wire, put her down,
get some rest.  What happens when you crack?  Does the body go first, or
the mind?

Levesque was flying visually in pitch blackness; there may as well have
been a black hood over the cockpit.  The aircraft was on instrument
flight, and he was the instrument.  Like the compass needle, he was
starting to spin.  His balance and sense of direction were holding the
Labrador on course, and he was losing both.  He felt vertigo; waves of
exhaustion rippled through him, cramps developed in his back, and the
stiffness in his hands became almost paralytic.  He was losing control.

And he'd long ago passed bingo fuel, the point of no return, the minimum
amount of fuel needed to reach an alternate airfield.  They would reach
Iqaluit or they'd ditch.

Levesque was jerked back to alertness by a glowing yellow light on the
instrument panel ." Warning: Fuel low." He had less than thirty minutes
remaining.  His forward speed had been cut in half.  There was 9,000
feet of snowstorm between the helicopter and the ground.  He doubted
they could cover the distance before the last drop of fuel was drained
from the sponsons.  He doubted they could find lqaluit, even if they got
there.  He had a sense of winding down; soon he'd be released.

It was clear to every member of the flight crew what would happen.  The
sponsons would be drained, and the engines would cough, shudder, and
fail.  Levesque would attempt to maintain control, and the Labrador
would auto-rotate through the cloud.  Then they would pick up ice, and
the ice would cost the autorotational control.  The Labrador would
pitch, and tumble, and turn.  It would take a long while to hit the
water from 9,000 feet.  They would have about ten minutes to make their
peace.

He'd tried.  They'd all tried.

"Rescue Three One Five, this is your top cover.  We're low on fuel and
making our final approach into Iqaluit.  See you on the ground, good
buddy."

"Aurora, I'm requesting you cancel final approach .

Overshoot.  I am declaring a mayday.  Low fuel lights are lit and we
can't acquire the Iqaluit beacon.  I'm going to need you in the air."

"We'll overshoot, Three One Five.  But we're past bingo fuel ourselves.
What do you need?"

"I want you to make a max effort climb to level nine thousand and circle
the townsite.  Turn on all your lights .

What I need is a lighthouse."

" See you upstairs."

Levesque dimmed his cockpit lights, cutting his own reflection in the
glass.  He waited a few minutes, burning precious fuel.

Finally the Aurora came up on his headset ." We're on our way, buddy.
We've acquired you on radar.  You were off course.  There's some nice
big hills dead ahead of you .

Turn left ninety degrees and you'll see us."

Levesque turned and saw the blinking lights of the Aurora burst out of
the cloud cover.  The aircraft wheeled to the left and began to circle.
He had a beacon.  No mariner was ever more pleased to see the lights of
port.

" Acquired you visually.  Looks real good."

Levesque pointed the nose of the Labrador in the direction of his
lighthouse, estimating his distance at about twelve miles.  It would be
close.  The Labrador passed over the peninsula and through the humid air
over Frobisher Bay, and began to pick up ice again.  To hell with it.

"Aurora, can you see Frobisher from your position?"

"Roger, Three One Five.  Can see the lights from here .

They're right below us."

It was deathly quiet in the cockpit.  All ears were tuned to the whine
of the turbines; everyone was waiting for the sudden cough, the
death-rattle, the silence, the whistling air, then the dead beating of
the rotors during the slow tumble to the ground.

Levesque reached the circling Aurora.  Peering directly down through the
glass chin bubble of the Labrador, he saw nothing but nimbus.  Then, a
wink.  He saw lights.  The lights flickered off and on, as the broken
clouds passed over them.  Levesque was reminded of the opening scenes of
clouds passing over the lights of London in a Disney film.

"I've got lqaluit.  Thanks, Aurora."

The Aurora banked away, peeling off towards its approach pattern.  It
too was dangerously low on fuel.

Levesque did not want to lose sight of the airfield, not for a moment.
He plummeted the nose of the Labrador through a spiraling dive towards
the airfield lights.  This was it: one kick at the cat.  He struggled to
keep the spinning aircraft level, so the pumps could drain the last
drops of fuel from the sponsons.  Dimples appeared on the windscreen, as
ice formed on the plunging nose.

The Labrador broke the cloud a few hundred feet above the airfield;
Levesque took his bearings and managed to put the helicopter down next
to the fuel dump.

The engineer unbuckled his harness and scrambled out the door; he would
have to hot refuel immediately, before the sponsons went dry.  If that
happened and the engines starved, they might never start again.

When the refueling was completed, and Levesque had got over the willies
enough to feel sure on his feet, he got out to check the fuel load.
They'd been down to 100 pounds a side. Maybe five minutes.

"I'm going in the hangar to meet the Aurora crew,' he told the engineer.
"I'd like to talk to them."

They had lots to talk about.  Levesque wanted to say thanks, and he
wanted to discuss the next leg of the voyage .

There were no more airfields between here and Alert, it was pitch dark,
and they would have to grope their way around Baffin Island.  The
journey so far had been unlike anything Levesque had ever experienced.
The next leg might well be tougher still.

After Mary Macauley and his crew from Greenwood had landed at the Thule
air base, they'd phoned Alert for instructions and been told to get some
rest.  They had bedded down in the North Star Hotel, the base transient
quarters.  Mary, still in his flight suit, hunkered down like the bear
he resembled.  His mind was clear and untroubled .

Someone else would surely reach the survivors in hours.  By the time he
awoke, the rescue would be over.  Might as well grab some shut-eye
before firing up the SARhird for the flight back to Greenwood and home.

He slept four hours, awoke refreshed, and switched on the television
set.  The Americans, of course, had cNN; the Canadians at Alert watched
canned tape.  CNN had a live news flash: a military transport had gone
down near the North Pole.  A massive rescue effort had been mounted but
was facing incredible odds.

Reporters.  Talk about old news.  Operation Arctic Storm was history.
Mary picked up the phone and called the Alert command post.

"Hey, I was just going to phone you,' said the duty officer, an old
friend of Mary's.  -The ground party got turned back, the weather's a
bitch.  But Hanson's cooked up some scheme for you guys to fly top
cover." 'When?"

"Now.  You guys are back in the breach."

Mary ran down the corridor of the transient quarters, banging on the
doors of his crew.

" Rise and shine!  Showtime!"

At the Thule operations centre, Mary's flight crew laid out air
navigation charts and planned their course and minimum altitudes.  The
navigator was a sharp-eyed youth from Longueuil named Mare Favre, and
Mary liked him .

The kid was quick on the uptake.  He'd already photocopied a map of
northern Ellesmere Island in a I:50,000 scale .

The map was itself a photocopy; the image was faint.  But it was five
times more precise than the charts on board the Hercules, and Favre
thought it might just come in handy.

When Mary and the crew bundled out to the Hercules, Arnie and his
SARtechs were already on board, waiting.

Mary's copilot, the cool-headed Randy Price, got the latest conditions.
Not good; in fact, aircraft had been grounded at Thule.  The winds were
at right angles to the runway, thirty-five knots gusting to forty.  The
turbulence warning on the navigation charts was in full effect.  Severe
turbulence was reported off the departure end of the runway.

Price looked at Mary.  Mary knew the disdain with which Price viewed the
basket-weavers who flew SAR straight and level.  Price had no problem
with the wild weather.  He'd go at the drop of a hat.

Arnie would, too.  But Arnie was sitting in the back.  He didn't have
responsibility for eighteen souls and a $21million piece of military
hardware.  Mary did, and he felt the full weight of responsibility of
the aircraft commander.

Ordinarily, Mary would blow his top and curse the goddamn weather and
storm out of the cockpit and raise hell in the operations room and get
Alert on the line and raise hell there, too.  He'd rack up one more
screw-up.

Arnie'd simply fly the airplane out of there.

Mary was the one who blew his top, the one with the temper.  Arnie was
the quiet type, but the passionate one.

He came through, while Mary reasoned himself into a corner.  Goddamn big
brother.

The wind was howling across the runway; snow was drifting over the white
pavement and piling up against the runway lights.  The book said the
plane should be grounded .

But there were fourteen souls stranded out there.  Mary thought of his
good buddies entombed by that snow and bitten by that wind.  Was passion
so out of place?  What is rescue but an act of love?

." Sowhatarewegoingtodo?" he saidtoprice ." Sithere all day?"

They were busting the limits; the takeoff was going to be dicey.  Mary
reckoned they were about five knots over maximum crosswind speed, but he
didn't look it up.  He could have; there was a book on board, the
aircraft operating instructions, with a table giving crosswind maximums.
If he'd opened it to that page, he would have found that under those
runway conditions and his payload, the maximum allowable crosswind speed
was twenty-six knots .

Not thirty-five, gusting to forty.  He was fourteen knots over the
limit, and Thule is a slippery strip to begin with.

Mary had briefed for a crosswind departure.  Price would fly the wings
while Mary handled the engine controls, nose wheel, and rudder.  Between
them, they would keep the aircraft level through their rising speed as
the crosswind sought to push them aside.  The four engines came up and
the Hercules-eighty tons of metal, thirty tons of aviation fuel, and
3,300 pounds of incendiary magnesium flares-began its hurtling course
down the runway.

The takeoff roll would be about 4,000 feet, less than half the Thule
runway.  The wind was striking them from the left.  Mary gave hard right
rudder and edged the nose wheel into the wind.  He selected full power.
Price held down the left wing by turning the control yoke towards the
wind; the wing lifted, resisting him.  Steadily, he pressed the wheel to
the left.  It reached the end of its travel; the aircraft had full left
aileron and full right rudder.  At about seventy knots-decision
speed-Mary dropped the nose-wheel steering and grabbed the yoke.

"My wheel,' he said.

"Your wheel,' Price confirmed.

Mary now had hands-and-feet control of the Hercules .

The aircraft was turned full crank into the crosswind, but it wasn't
enough.  The wind blew the high tail of the Hercules and pushed it like
a weathervane.  The aircraft began drifting perilously to the right.
They were past the point of no return, and the rudder and wings didn't
have enough authority against the wind.

Arnie, in the cargo bay, felt the aircraft drift and grabbed an intercom
headset.  He wanted to hear what was going on in the cockpit.  He wanted
to hear the big, booming, reassuring voice of his little brother,
laughing at some minor slip-up.

He heard Mary say: 'Fuck." They couldn't abort now, not without causing
a world of hurt.  They had one chance: shut down power on one outboard
engine.  Mary hoped there was enough runway remaining for a three-engine
departure.  He hoped the differential power would steer the Herc into
the wind.  He pulled the throttle lever back.

The engineer saw the falling gauge: 'Low torque on number one!' 'Number
one's down,' Price said.  'Abort?" 'I'm doing it!" Mary shouted.  'I'm
doing it!' The Hercules strained towards rotation speed on its remaining
three engines, but the gambit had worked.  The Herc followed the centre
line of the runway as Mary counted off the yards, feeling the nose cone
lighten its weight on the runway as the Hercules prepared to become a
creature of the air.

Then they hit a snowdrift.  The cockpit banged loudly, the cargo bay
shuddered.  The Herc was not under control; it was in transition between
ground and sky, and if it chose sky, the collision with the drift
wouldn't matter.  If it chose ground ...  well, that would be another
story.

The nose lifted; the landing gear left the ground.  Mary restored full
power and the Hercules climbed steeply to clear high terrain on the
departure end of the runway .

Then, at 600 feet, they hit severe turbulence.  The Herc dropped 100
feet through an air pocket, slamming as it regained its traction against
the wind.  Finally, they were away.

In the cargo bay, Arnie turned to his SARtechs, most of whom were
green-faced and white-knuckled: "That's my little brother."

Misery

The singing had long since ended.  It had ended and been forgotten like
the vapours of a dream, like the dreams of warmth, of family, of love,
all forgotten now.  None of the survivors any longer remembered reasons
for living; they were living without reason, without memory.  They were
nearing death; they were living.

They did not lie there, coated in ice, and warm themselves with the
memory of a child, of a curving waist, of parents.  This would have been
too painful to bear.  While the cold exploded the cells of their hands
and feet, they mourned the loss of trivial things.  One of them
realized, as the pain became a pleasant numbness, that he would miss his
morning jog. That is what lost legs would mean; missing the fresh
stillness of morning, his warmed body moving through the dawn.  Another
would miss woodworking with his hands, creating things simple but
durable: a lawn chair, a table, a child's swing.

They had spoken among themselves earlier, of other things.  Through lips
numb and increasingly useless they had shared their lives and remembered
the things worth living.  They had named their children, their jobs,
their towns.  Then they had stopped speaking of such things, by silent
accord, just as they had stopped singing.

The inner walls of the tail were encrusted in ice; ice crystals spun
about them as the wind howlingly probed the tail.  Ice crystals came to
rest on their clothing.  They were becoming ice.  Their diminishing heat
melted the ice and turned it to water to mix with the diesel fuel on
their clothing, and then their skin had become cold.  Cold as ice; dead,
pale, hard flesh, exploded cells and frozen fluids.  The slurry on their
clothing had also turned to hard ice.

The metal grate burned them.  Comfort was nothing more than the vapour
of a dream; but they attempted to relieve the pain anyway.  They would
lie still, until the cold metal burned into a shoulder, a hip, or a
knee, and the wounded cried out in pain.  They would all have to move at
once; it was too crowded for only the one suffering the most to move.
They shared their suffering, in a real sense; it was painful to turn
over.  It took a long time-about twenty minutes.  Their clothes had
frozen to the metal grate, and it took all their strength to break their
clothing free; they jostled one another as they did so.  An icy elbow
would dig into the burnt flesh of a face; a hand would press against a
broken hip, grinding the bones; a leg would become tangled in the nylon
rope, twisting the fractured bones .

Each move was a chorus of groans, apologies, curses, screams.

Monty, whose mind was never clear-he could tell you his name and unit
with perfect clarity one moment, and believe the plane was landing the
next-had decided to go home.  'I'm tired of waiting,' he said.  He'd got
out of his sleeping bag.  His hands had frozen into mallets and he could
not pull off the bag; he pushed and pounded at it, twisting and
thrusting his body.  This caused hurt all down the line.  Somehow he got
out of the bag and stood on his frozen feet.  'I'm going to walk to
Alert."

"Don't be stupid, you'll never make it.  You'll be dead inside twenty
minutes."

"All right,' he said ." I'll walk to Edmonton."

They had struggled with him, grabbed his coat and held him.  He got back
into the sleeping bag, and the others made him lie crosswise behind
them, so he would have to step over their bodies if he decided to wander
off again.  They had no strength to hold him, but used their own broken
bodies as a protective barrier.

"Home,' he said, then slipped under.

Something had beeped once, back when they had still thought of rescue.
An electronic beep was a familiar sound, as a whistling kettle once was;
it was the sound of answering machines and alarm clocks and microwave
units heating coffee.  It arrested them, because it took them back to
the world.

But it was only Mario's watch; the beep was his wakeup call to catch the
flight.  It told them that twenty-four hours had passed since they'd
started this journey.  They had resented it quite a bit.  But that had
been a long while before.

The wind rushed against the tail, a demonic roaring of wind that never
gathered enough voice for a howl.  It hissed, as particles of ice
scratched against the metal shelter.

Wilma tried not to listen, even though the wind filled her brain and
made her angry, weak, insane.  Paul had told her she would be able to
hear the parachutes of the SARtechs; they will flutter and pop, he said,
and we will know of our deliverance.

I'll hear nothing, Wilma thought.  I'll hear nothing but the wind.

She had no idea how long they had been like this.  She thought Mario's
beeping watch, her last bearing in time, had been twelve or perhaps
twenty hours ago.  She knew they were into their second day on the
ground.  The second day-she'd forgotten.  Time for the last of the
candy.

My hands, where are my hands?  Oh, in the sleeve.  I put them in my
sleeve.  There they are.  Imagine, Wilma, losing your hands like that.
The candies are on your chest, nestled on your breast ' for warmth.
There.  They are cold.  Your skin is cold.

Why do they put them in these plastic wrappers?  It's hard to get the
wrappers off.  Don't drop them, Wilma.  Use your teeth.  You are
shaking.  Shaking is good.  Stop shaking and you die.

Maybe if I eat a candy I will warm up.  Maybe my foot will thaw.  Then
it will hurt again.  Should I eat a candy?

There, it's done.  The wrapper is off.  There's a body .

There's its head.  Its face is cold.  Find the lips.  Push the candy
through the lips.

"Thuck.  Don't shew." Dear God, now even her mouth was ceasing to
function properly.

Another body, another face, another open mouth.  So many mouths.  Like
little birds, like Communion.  Have you been good little birds?

One more.  I can do three at a time.  I counted; so now I know.  That's
something.  Three at a time.  Three is a holy number; which one?  After
three days, he rolled aside the rock.  He must have been cold, dead for
three days.  Three, and then my hands don't work.  I can't find them.
When I do find them I can't move them.

"Open." Push the candy through.  Oh, I hurt this one .

This one has the broken jaw.

"Can't thuck."

"Tongue," Wilma said ." Melt."

Next is Paul.  No candy, Paul.  Have to wait until Wilma gets her hands
again.  She pushed against Paul's back.  He had been very wet, from the
exertion, and now he was ice .

His back was cold and solid.  He felt like the woods in winter; hard,
frosted.

Poor Paul.  Because he was the engineer, everyone expected him to make
things work.  Paul had fired the flares.  Paul had worked the radios.
Then they had found the fuel stove and brought it to him.  They had
plenty of fuel, diesel fuel, and the primus stove could be switched over
to burn diesel.  But Paul's hands were too cold to work the valve; he
needed a small wrench, or some kind of tool.  They remembered the knife,
the one that had fallen through Rick's pocket.

Such a tiny mistake.

John and Joe must be freezing out there.  No hats.  They shouldn't go
outside without a hat, not in this weather.  At least Joe has plenty of
hair.  John is bald.  You lose most of your heat through your head. What
was it, 60 percent?

That's a number.  That's something.

What do I think they should do, take Bob's hat?  They are being logical.
They gave out the clothes when they were warm and didn't need them.  Now
they are cold and need them more than we do, but if we give them our
hats then we'll be the ones who need them.  When there is one less of
us, there will be one more hat for the others.

The others.  Sue and Bob.  I must remember.  Sue .

Fractures: both lower legs, ribs, right shoulder, elbow, maybe neck.
Internal bleeding.  Legs lacerated and burned .

Bob.  Horribly broken back.  Right leg fractured in two places.

Remember.  I must remember.  For the rescuers.

Every now and then there was an outburst.  Someone would lose heart.
Bill, blinded, would tuck Monty's hands away.  A few minutes later he
would hear the hands beating against the icy metal of the tail, an odd
pinging thump.  Bill would tuck them away again.  Shuffle, thump, tuck.
Shuffle, ping, tuck.

"When those bastards get here I'm going to give them a piece of my mind.
Where are they?  What's taking so long?

They'll hear from me, those bastards."

" That's the spirit.  That's what I like to hear."

The others let the tired heart speak.  No one interrupted.  Someone
would confirm what had been said, for the benefit of the others.  Then
no more was said.

There was movement at the mouth of the tail.  A dark figure.  Wilma
started.  I didn't hear them.  I didn't hear their parachutes, because
of the crazy wind; but I knew they would come.  Remember to tell them
about Sue and Bob.

It was only Joe.  His cotton flight suit was frosted over with ice, but
his body heat had melted through the vital places.  His back, his
underarms, and his groin were wet .

There is no more efficient way to drain off heat than through cold
water.  Walking through the storm was like placing a candle in the wind.
Outside, in the raging howl, it was -66 Celsius, -92 Fahrenheit.  The
cold was almost inconceivable.

Joe had been shivering for as long as he could remember.  He couldn't
make the shivering stop, even when the muscles of his back and legs had
cramped solid.  He had thought the cramp would at least stop the
shivering.  He found that cramped muscles also shiver.  He found a whole
new level of pain.

Joe crawled into his place, directly behind Richard Dumoulin.  Richard
felt the man press against him, shivering.

"How are they?"

"Alive."

Richard thought he was as cold as he could get, but Joe's body pressing
against his back made him feel even colder.  Then he felt Joe pounding
against his back.  Joe was hitting him, hard.

" What are you doing?"

"Knock the ice off."

Dumoulin allowed him to pound, feltjoe tugging at the shards of ice as
they broke apart but clung to the fibres of his parka.  Joe's tugging,
like every movement, caused pain down the line.  Mario's hips ground
sickeningly as the bones shifted.  He twitched involuntarily, and his
foot slipped through the grate.  His leg was trapped.

Mario cried.  He was huddled under the tarpaulin and sounded far away.
He was crying, and he apologized: 'It's just me talking."

They took pity on Mario and somehow managed to move him away from their
company.  Some of the men pulled their own clothes free of the ice and
dragged the whimpering Mario down by their feet.  They placed him there,
in his sleeping bag, so their exertions would not hurt him.  When John
came in, he could lie with him.  John was in and out all the time, and
now he could huddle with Mario and now Someone was hammering on the
tail!  It sounded like a penny hammer being struck against the frigid
metal, or like blocks of wood being struck against each other.  Clang .

Clang.  Clang.  It was a hammer.  Wilma's heart filled with joy.  It was
them!  I didn't hear them, because of the crazy wind.  But I knew they
would come.

"You're here!" Wilma called.  'Who is it?" The," said Monty ."
Straightening out my hands." His frozen hands struck the metal of the
tail.  Clang.

Ping.  Clang.

Wilma imagined the flesh being chipped away like marble on the hard
metal.  'Monty,' she called.  'If you do that any more, I'll kill you."

"Okay, Doc.  No more."

Clang!  Clang!  Clang!

"Somebody stop him!'

Richard Dumoulin somehow managed to drag himself backwards until his
face struck a frozen boot.  He crawled over Monty and found the poor
man's hands.  He held the shattered hands in his own, pressing them
against his own broken face .

He held them until, mercifully, Monty went under again.

Mario cracked.

"I can't take it any more!  Get a gun.  Bust have a gun here.  Get a gun
and shoot me.  Okay, then.  Get a gun, I'll shoot byself."

The others listened to his sobs.  Mario, with such a beautiful family.
It wasn't something extra to live for, now, just something to think
about.  His beautiful family were vapours.  He felt all the more
desolate without them.

"Get a stick!  Somebody get a stick.  Get a stick and hit me with it.
Hit me in the head until I'm dead."

Wilma said to Mare, "Maybe you should talk to him in French."

"I don't want goddamn French.  I want a stick!  I don't want it to hurt
any more.  Blease I need a stick, blease!"

Is this how it will go?  Is this what we will become, one by one?

Who is that now?  John.  Stumbling in.  He is walking like a zombie, a
drunk.  He should have a hat.

"Alive," he said.

"Good."

No one spoke.  A few minutes passed.  John lay down beside Mario-it
seemed to take forever-and then spoke again.

"Isn'tgoing to work.  They're not coming.  Aren'tgoing to make it. Never
going to come."

He was in the garden of Gethsemane, Wilma realized .

He was on the cross of doubt, asking after his father.

"They won't come now."

The others did not know what to say.  John had never before had a moment
of doubt.

Paul said: "Caw row."

Did I forget to call the roll?  I'm forgetting so many things; the roll,
the names, my hands.  Let's see, then.  The reds.

"Mario." Mario has a fractured hip.  Mario hurts.  He cries a lot.  He
sounds far away.  He wants to die.

" Here."

"Dave." Daveisburned.  He has abruised spine'likemine but lower down.
His kneecaps are broken, and his left arm.

,,Yuh."

"Bill." Third-degree burns on his face and chest, burns on his thighs
and groin.  I rolled Bill in the snow.  Bill rested his head in my lap.
I never looked at his eyes.

"Here."

"Monty." Monty has a low level of consciousness .

Monty isn't speaking to me.

"Bill, is Monty there?"

Bill reached out his hand.

"He's here."

"Hands in the bag?"

Bill traced the outline of Monty's frigid body, found the hands.  They
were outside the bag, hard as metal.  He tucked them in, like putting
dumb-bells in a gym bag.

"They're in." Monty won't stay in his bag.  Paradoxology.  No.
Paradoxical.  Paradoxical undressing.  Monty's brain is burning up, all
the heat is in his brain.  Monty's freezing to death and he feels hot.

Where was I?  Yellow?

"Rick."

Rick, not Nick, Rick with the torn face, the eyeball like a raw egg
yolk.  The smashed face and bruised back.

"Tony."

Tony who couldn't talk right.  Cut-up Tony, with the broken jaw.

"Uhn." And me.  Wilma.  I'm here.  All of me, even my hands .

Wilma has a bruised spine and broken ankle.  I'm the doctor.  Doc.

"Mare."

"Yeah."

"Mike."

Mike who looked out through something that was neither quite a face nor
a balaclava.  Please don't touch it, Mike.  Please don't pull off your
face.

"Here."

"Paul."

"Here."

(cioe."

"Here."

"John."

Nothing.

Joe's flight suit was bonded to the frozen grate, like a child's tongue
to an iron fence.  He worked it unstuck and then, on hands and knees,
like a baby learning to crawl, he negotiated the grate.  His hands
slipped on the ice, the shreds of insulation, the blackened jumble of
char and ice .

He made his way in the frozen reek of fuel and cinders and urine.  There
he was.  There was John.  He put his cheek to John's lips.

"John," Wilma said again.

"No."

"John?"

"Wilma," said Joe ." Don't."

Stop Drop

The Mountie in lqaluit had run his snowmobile out to the hangar to tell
Mark Levesque and his crew they were nuts if they thought they could fly
a helicopter inland up the length of Baffin Island in this weather.  The
constable knew the area by air and warned of fjords that would trap
them.

Their only possible route would be along the eastern shoreline to Cape
Dyer, the Mountie said, and they'd be crazy to try even that.

They decided to try it.  There were people dying out there.

They took off in the Labrador, hugging the coastline, using the radar
'paint" of the Aurora flying above them to ride a very thin line.  Too
close to the coast and they risked slamming into the cliffs; too far out
and it would be fatal to ditch the aircraft.

Mark Levesque was in the back seat.  He'd been relieved at the controls
by Captain Pierre Bolduc and his flight crew; they had been awake as
many hours as Levesque, but as passengers on the deadhead flights.  They
flew without incident to Cape Dyer, an Inuit fishing village with a
usable fuel cache.  Levesque got out to see if the weather was breaking
at all, and saw a fifty-foot white Frisbee spinning above his head-the
whirling rotors were solidly coated with ice.

Boiduc got out, too, and the men considered the problem.  There was
finely pebbled ice on the aircraft's leading surfaces and fuel sponsons.
There must also have been pebble ice on the whirling rotors, which would
destroy their lift.

They didn't want to shut the engines down; if they did, the engines
might never start again.  They decided to idle them; then, with the
blades spinning freely, they would apply the rotor brake just long
enough to shake the ice free .

Bolduc allowed the engines to whine down, then hit the brake.  The Lab
shuddered as the chop of the rotors came to a halt.  Ice shot from the
rotors, spraying the tarmac.

The Frisbee was now only four feet in diameter.  They could fly, but
they could not control the aircraft in the event of engine failure.
Levesque and Bolduc discussed whether to continue.  The engines were
long overdue for a mechanical breakdown, and now, with the ice, they
didn't stand a chance of surviving an engine failure.

They decided to press on to Clyde River.

Bolduc set his altitude by the cloud cover.  He hugged the base of the
weather system, flying between 100 and 500 feet above the water.  It was
pitch dark, and the Labrador was following a course set by the Aurora,

A SARtech in the rear of the Labrador spotted the first iceberg.  It
towered some 400 feet above the waterline of Home Bay.  He watched its
dark, steely, luminescent shadow pass beneath the belly of the Labrador.

" We're in a pack of icebergs," he said.

Everybody was remarkably calm; it was as though the twists of the voyage
had exhausted their store of alarm .

Bolduc rose to 500 feet.  There was some discussion about how close they
had come to actually striking the iceberg: perhaps no more than fifty
feet.  The Lab was now flying in a thin vertical corridor, 100 feet deep
at most.  That corridor was the only safe passage between the mist of
ice above and the mountains of ice below.

All the passengers and crew kept their eyes peeled out the round
portholes of the Labrador.  Neither the Lab nor the Aurora overhead
could detect the bergs on the radar;

eyes were their last defense.  Most fell into a kind of anxious reverie.

"I've been thinking," the SARtech said, after a time.

"So have I," said Levesque ." What it would be like to ditch in that
water."

"What I've been thinking," said the SARtech, 'is, who rescues us?"

On his second foray from the Alert station on the GoTracks, Fred Ritchie
and his SARtechs had followed the convoy's old tracks as far as Mushroom
Point.  They had made good time over the first few miles.  They strayed
out over the ice a few times, heard it cracking in the darkness beneath
them.  It scared Ritchie half to death.  He could never tell whether the
crackling noise was simply the treads chewing the ice, or the ice itself
breaking up.  Each time they'd made it back onto solid ground.

They had loaded up the back of the Go-Track with five gallons of hot
coffee in an urn, a crate full of Magic Pantry dinners, a pallet of
Coca-Cola, a box of Hershey chocolate bars, a 300-pound survival
toboggan, and five SARtechs .

With a twenty-five-knot tailwind at 340 degrees true, they found
themselves going downhill with a stiff breeze at their back.  They were
smoking along.

In the frigid, stormy darkness, they rumbled along the coastline and
then veered inland.  They climbed over hills and through low valleys.
Each time they approached a ravine, Fred hopped out and ran ahead to
check it out.  The bitter wind instantly sucked the air from his lungs.
It was frigging cold.  Those poor bastards out there.

They moved inland, climbing gradually through the storm.

According to the direction of the ridges, they were heading south,
zeroing in on the crash site.  They hit a steep ravine, and the drivers
of the Go-Tracks-who were not hairy-forearmed SARtechs but vehicle
techs-told their passengers to get the hell out because they didn't know
if the Go-Tracks would make it.  In the howling wind, the SARtechs
formed a chain of flashlights across the ravine; the drivers roared the
Go-Tracks ahead, tipping over the edge, slipping and sliding down the
slope.  Then everyone got back in and the vehicles clambered up the
other side.

A few minutes later a couple of the other SARtechs got out-Fred was
getting cold-to guide the Go-Tracks along the edge of a ravine.  They
were supposed to keep the tractors away from the brink, but they got
separated from each other by about twenty feet.  They could see the
GoTrack lights, but they couldn't see each other.  Each thought the
other had fallen into the ravine.  It should have been a warning.  But
the SARtechs climbed back in, and the GoTracks roared along at full
throttle, hell for leather and protected by God's patience with fools
and a Casio watch .

They were at top throttle, tiller bars pressed against the metal
dashboard, Fred peering out.  The lights picked up the white blindness
of snow hurtling out of the darkness at them.

The whiteness turned to ink.

"Stop!'

The driver cut throttle and yanked back the tiller bars .

Fred reached for the radio transmitter.  Inches ahead of the flat pane
of their windscreen, the snow seemed to run out .

Beyond the white edge was a dark void.  Good Lord-it was a sheer ravine.
Visibility ahead was reduced to a few feet, and Fred could see no more
than four body lengths to the side.  He strained to find a way out to
the right.

"That was lucky,' he said.

A jagged line of blackness came creeping through the snow crust towards
the Go-Track.  They were on a cornice of snow overhanging the edge of
the ravine.  It was breaking away.

"Holy shit!'

The black crack crossed behind Fred's line of vision; the nose of the
Go-Track pitched forward; they were looking straight down.  'Turn left!"
Fred shouted to the Go-Track behind, bracing himself as his own Go-Track
plunged, nose down, and smashed into a rock ledge thirty feet below.
Fred was buffeted left and right before snow sprayed over the
windscreen.  He believed he would die, of spraying glass, rocks, and
mangled metal; or of the impact of the 300-pound toboggan behind him. In
the white heat of panic, he felt remorse.  The other SARtechs,
meanwhile, were grabbing their seats and one another, faces tight with
fear; the impact had thrust the toboggan forward, all right, but it had
caught on the engine compartment between the two front seats.  SARtechs
crashed into it.  The compartment was awash in hot coffee and Magic
Pantry dinners.

The driver had been thrown forward onto the tiller bars, driving his
feet into the throttle pedals, and this is what saved them.  Rather than
tumbling over and continuing its plunge, the Go-Track clutched at the
ledge, ground away at it with full power.  The treads gained purchase,
carrying the machine forward.  It found its feet and lurched down to the
canyon floor.  There, the driver pulled the tillers back.  The engine
idled, and the shaken SARtechs gathered their wits.

"My ass is so puckered up you'd need a Sledge-o-Matic to drive a nail up
there."

The laughter was manic with relief

The Go-Track headed towards the frozen sea, thumping and grinding along
in the darkness.  The second tractor followed along the top of the
ravine; they would meet at sea level.

Fred pondered.  If that cliff had been any deeper, you'd have killed
five people.  Some hero.  What's with you, man?

Are the risks really worth it?

As they rumbled down the ravine bed to the shoreline, Fred called up
Alert for word on survivors.  The latest-and it would be their last
word, the radios having died-was that fourteen souls were still alive.
Their spirits were failing.  They were critically cold and had critical
injuries.

Frostbite and hypothermia were setting in.  They were suffering as no
creature ought to suffer.

Fred calculated his chances at about fifty-fifty.  No contest: he would
press on.  He was no longer doing it for the regimental sergeant major.
He was doing it for them .

He was acting not from obligation but from desire.  He was doing it
because it was his job to save lost souls.

The Go-Tracks met at the shoreline and turned south .

At the estuary of the Sheridan River they were again forced to head out
over open water.  The vehicles creaked ominously on top of the
ice-everybody held their breath-but did not break through.  Once past
the Sheridan, Fred reckoned, they were home free.

They turned inland.  As they gained altitude, they entered a thick cloud
bank.  The wind and ice pellets were even worse than they had been, but
Fred was exhilarated .

They had finally entered the Arctic storm that hung over Box Top 22 like
a shroud.

lylary Macauley and his Hercules arrived above the crash site in time to
make out the roof lights of Fred's convoy as it entered the heart of the
storm.  Freaky, this weather.  The flight from Thule had been clear as a
bell .

Even the coastline of Ellesmere Island had been perfectly clear.  A few
miles inland, over the crash site, it was socked in down to the ground.
Mary called up the Alert station.

"Alert, this is Rescue Three Zero Five out of Greenwood.  We're flying
top cover for the ground search party .

Give us their frequency so we can establish ground comms."

"No way, Three Zero Five.  You relay through us, we get them on the
VHF-FM radio.  We talk to you, you talk to us, we talk back to them. You
don't have VHF-FM on the ce-130."

"My Here is equipped with VHF-FM, Alert.  Give me the frequency."

"We're supposed to coordinate with the command post."

"Now listen, buddy."

"How will command keep track of you?" 'Give me that goddamn frequency,
you little puke." And so, circumventing the textbook command, control,
and communications procedure established by the Canadian military, Mary
bypassed Alert and spoke directly to the ground party.  Fred's first
words to the circling Here were, "Good old Mary."

"Turn ninety degrees to the right, buddy.  You're approaching a ravine."

Sometimes the ground party's roof lights were lost to the Hercules; Fred
would tell Mary when he could hear the Hercules overhead.  Other times,
Mary could see the ground party clearly even though ground visibility
was zero.  At these moments the Hercules navigator, working from his
radar scope and from the chart he had photocopied in Thule, was able to
supply precise, immediate directions for the blinded ground party.  Not
that Fred always followed them.

"Okay, Fred, you're in a ravine.  Turn right fifty degrees and you'll
find an easy way out in about a hundred yards."

"That'll take us out on the ice.  We've got to turn left."

"Negative, good buddy.  You're heading out to sea now.  Turn right."

" You're ass-backwards, Mary.  We're turning left."

Mary instructed his loadmaster to drop a flare .

"Okay, Fred, see that flare?"

"Drop it any time, good buddy."

"It's behind you, Fred."

There was no reply, but Mary could see the headlights swing away from
the pack ice.

Every quarter-hour, the Hercules peeled off to check weather conditions
over the crash site.  They'd made innumerable passes when the weather
broke temporarily and Arnie's SARtechs were able to spot the tail
section of Box Top 22 in a clear, snowbound field about a mile long and
a half-mile wide.  There were no signs of life.

Mary left Fred's ground party to its own devices; it was time to
concentrate on a parachute attempt.  In the back of the Hercules,
Arnie's SARtechs suited up in an atmosphere of keen anticipation. They'd
been waiting for this chance for nearly thirty hours, ever since leaving
Greenwood .

They were primed and ready.

Mary circled the crash site, flying a box pattern, but by the third pass
the exhaust from his turboprop engines had created cloud cover.  He was
flying through the condensation of his own contrail, and the jumpers
lost sight of the ground.  The jump had to be called off.

Meanwhile, the U.S.  Air National Guard arrived on the scene.  The
Americans had dispatched two Hercules aircraft to the area.  The first,
from Keflavik in Iceland, had flown to Thule to act as an air-to-air
refueler for the Pavehawk helicopters winging their way to the U.S.  air
base in the belly of a c-5 Galaxy Transport.  The second Hercules, from
the Elmendorf air base at Anchorage, had a load of para-rescue jumpers
on board.  It flew directly to Alert and began circling above Mary.

Mary asked the Americans to drop some flares; perhaps they could provide
enough illumination that he would need only one pass over the crash
site.  That would solve the exhaust problem without sacrificing light.
The American Hercules was a few thousand feet higher than Mary, however,
and its flares disappeared in the cloud cover above him.  The clouds
pulsed overhead with an eerie orange glow, but not much light filtered
through.

Mary continued to fly a box pattern, dropping flares .

He was flying on the gyro compass, putting the aircraft through a series
of tight manoeuvres while maintaining an altitude of 2,500 feet above
sea level.  That give him 1,500 feet of clearance over the crash site.
On each pass, the pilot gave a five-second warning, then spoke over the
intercom: "Flare, release ...  now!'

"Flare clear."

The flare fell 250 feet before the abrupt jerk of its parachute ignited
the magnesium core: "Ignition.  Flare burn."

Mary followed the procedure again and again.  After one release, the
voice in his headset said, 'Malfunction!  ' The flare had ignited, but
its dazzling core seemed to be bouncing across the sky.  Mary watched
the light skip along.

"That's no malfunction.  It's hit the ground."

Somehow they had flown, unwittingly, within 250 feet of the rocky
terrain.  Mary lifted the nose, as the flight engineer cross-checked the
altimeters-'Altitude's okay'and the copilot, Randy Price, cross-checked
the compasses.

"Christ, Mary,' said Price, there's a thirty-degree variance."

The violent manoeuvring of the aircraft had thrown the gyros out of
whack.  They had traveled a few degrees from true with each turn of the
aircraft, so gradually that nobody on the flight deck had noticed.  Mary
was 30 degrees west of where he thought he was.  The terrain elevation
in his quadrant was 2,200 feet, not 1,000 feet as he had imagined ."
We're outta here,' he said, and began to climb above the cloud cover.

Arnie came over the microphone.  'Mary, what the hell are you doing?"

"Compasses are out.  We have to reset them." When the circling U.S.
Hercules saw the Canadian SARtechs bank away from the crash site, it
moved in .

"Rescue Three Zero Five, this is 56th Air Rescue.  Since you're leaving,
we'll see if we can get our guys in."

Arnie heard the exchange on his headset: 'Mary, you can't!  '

"Have to."

"My boys are going nuts back here.  You've got to get us over the site.
Those bastards are going to waltz in and beat us to it."

"We have to do this.  Keep your shirt on."

Arnie was nearly blind with rage at his own impotence, inadequate gear,
and lousy luck.  But his little brother was in command of the aircraft.
He had to defer to Mary.

Frigging Americans!  Arnie could just see the U.S. parajumpers with
their $1,000 Robocop jumpsuits (he wore kapok padding and cotton); their
night vision goggles (he had a miner's lamp); their global positioning
units (he used bush sense); their state-of-the-art square canopies that
would tame any wind (he had a vintage round canopy).  Of course the
Americans would get in.  They had the technology.  They'd pull off the
most daring rescue in Canadian history, and his SARtechs would be
bystanders.

Goddamn!  Arnie ripped off his headset and fired it at the bench.

A Big White Room

It's my birthday.  I'm twenty-six.  I was born on the first of November
and married on the fourteenth of September.

I've been married six weeks.  I'm twenty-six years old.

Precisely.

Clang.  Clang.  Clang.

"Mondy!"

"Straighten my fingers."

"Why?"

"Mathroom."

Kidneys still working.  That's good.

No, bad.  Heat loss through the groin.  Freezing urine, groin, thighs.
Bad.

Good or bad.  What am I deciding?  Oh, yes.  'Try to hold it, Mondy."

Good to want to.  Good to hold it.  Come back, Joe.

Don't stay outside.  Come back inside.

"I'll help him."

Who's that?  Mare.  Trying to get up.  Stuck to the tail.

Frozen stuck.  All stuck.  just have to pass water in his bag.

Going to see if there's bags outside.  That's what he said.

He meant, going to see if they're dead.

We have three bags.  The others have four.  If they are dead, we should
take their bags.

I don't want a bag.  Twenty-six.  Six.  Little numbers, too little.  No,
it's good.  Good for George.  Don't think of George.

Joe.  I hear him.  He's back.  He's at the opening.  I can see him.

Empty-handed.  Great news.  They're alive.  Lie beside me, Joe.  You're
so cold.  You're cold as stone.

"How are they?"

"Afraid.  Leave them."

"We won't."

Oh, Joe.  You're wet again.  Shivering so.  Paul, too.  Paul is so cold.
Cold and still.  He said, 'Waw." I asked what he was thinking and he
said, 'Waw, ghosts and colours."

My bladder is full, too.  How will I do this?  Easier for the men.  They
used the hole in the back.  When they could still move.  Now they empty
the bladder where they are .

Sometimes the zipper is frozen, or their hands, they go in their pants.
Sometimes they get the zipper down.  They try to put it through the
grates.  The urine is wet, it freezes to the metal.  I hear them crying,
tearing skin.

It's not easier for them.

I don't want to wet everyone.  Sometimes the men wet everyone.  The
urine steams, you smell it.  It flows around the grates and then
freezes, and all the clothes are frozen to the metal.  Pants stuck to
the metal with frozen urine.

Roll over.  On my knees.  I can do this.  I can pull my pants down so
they won't get wet.

Didn't work.  Wet from thighs to knees.  Warm, then cold.  Then stiff.

The flow has started.  It was ...  Tuesday night.  Wednesday, Thursday,
is this Friday?  I've started.

They'll smell it.  A polar bear.  A wolf.  They'll smell it on the air.
They'll follow the hormones, stalk the trail of pheromones.  The
rescuers won't find us but the animals will.  They'll follow my scent to
this tail.  They'll eat us before we're dead.

My fault.

My body's fault.  My body.

George.  Six weeks.

Pull up my pants.  Pull down the balaclava.  At least Joe has stopped
shivering.  That's good.

Good or bad?

Twenty-six.  Six.  Precisely.

Honey, I am here.  In this room.  A big white room .

That's where I am, honey.  I was somewhere else before.  I went to see
the bags.

They were worried I would go away and leave them so I covered them with
snow.

I covered them with snow because the bags were burning and one of them
had a punctured lung.  Tom.  His name was Tom.  The other one was named
Glow Worm .

They died in my arms.  Have you seen Glow Worm?  He was shivering.  The
bags had a sore back from shivering.

Honey, do you know where I left those bags?  Did I leave them with the
baby?  You prayed for me?  And the baby?  I have to go.  I have to find
some bags.  I said I wouldn't leave them.

They fell down in the snow.  The bags tried to walk through old
footsteps, but the snow grabbed at them and they fell down.  They stood
up and fell down.  Flat on their faces.  It hurt their faces.

Honey, get Karen to help find the bags.  Get the whole crew together,
help me find the bags.  I think we put the bags down for a minute, but
when we came back the bags had drifted over.

Did the wind blow the bags away?  I think they're gone .

Tell the others to help me find the bags.  I promised I wouldn't leave
them.  I want them to come back.

They didn't answer the roll call.  John didn't answer and I said Wilma
don't.

Bob remembered hearing the footsteps.  He had seen the beam of light.

66joe."

"Ogay?"

"Hey, I can' dalk.  Godda go.  Godda get back o'r people."

Hours ago.

Bob marked time in fractions of an inch.  When he was first buried in
the snow, the tarpaulin had been about three inches from his face.  His
right hand, the only movable part of his body, could travel about six
inches, from his nose, across his cheek, past his right ear.  He had
been able to lift his head and swat at the soggy goose feathers.  As
time went on, his cavity grew smaller.  Snow piled up on the tarpaulin .

It was packed down by the wind.

Bob now had less than an inch in front of his face-he could touch the
tarpaulin with his tongue-and about three inches of movement with his
right hand.  It was pitch black.  A one-inch by three-inch black cavity.
Time had moved two inches.

Bob had a raging thirst.  Being marooned in snow is rather like being
Iost at sea; you're surrounded by undrinkable water .

Snow will not slake a thirst, and Bob knew better than to eat it-it
would drain his body of precious calories and cool his body core.  But
he was dying of thirst.  Severe cold rapidly increases the body's rate
of dehydration through the lungs .

Even at rest inside a snow shelter, with the humidity approaching 100
percent, Bob was losing a litre of water every twelve hours through the
mere act of breathing.  He had lost nearly three litres, without
replenishment.

He decided to have a drink.  With his free hand, he worked the frozen
snow behind his ear.  The right ear-his heel was behind the left one.
His fingers were stiff, devoid of feeling.  Still, he had his little
metal spar.  He poked at the snow.  The heat thrown from the back of his
neck-where the body sheds most of its heat-had melted the snow.  It had
then frozen again, into a solid headrest of ice.  This was hard for Bob
to break up.  He chipped at the ice behind his ear.  His hand and
forearm were exhausted by the effort .

But he was being driven mad by thirst.  just as he had never known such
pain, he had never felt such need.

He had a plan.  He would hold the chips of frozen snow in the palm of
his hand.  The hand would melt them, and he would drink.

It was not easy.  He got enough chips to fit in his palm, and closed
frozen fingers around them.  He worked the hand between the tarpaulin
and his face, until the edge of his hand was against the corner of his
lips.  Then he squeezed.

Even though his hands were cold, the ice would melt under pressure.  He
waited, squeezing, feeling his hand cramp.  Then he felt a few drops
forming on his knuckles .

They pooled, then coursed down his fingers to his lips .

Drink!

His mouth filled with the noxious taste of diesel fuel .

You idiot, Thomson.

He tried to relax the hand.  He tried, a few times, to reach his fingers
across his face and dig away the feathers blocking his mouth and
nostrils, but the fingers were too cold and stiff, and the space too
tight.

He lay still, feeling the venom of the cold deaden him .

A snake of morphine.  It entered the stomach, worked its way through his
bowels towards his chest.  It entered his fingers, moved into his hands
and up through his arms.  It got as far as the backs of his shoulders.
His arms were gone, his stomach was gone.  In those parts he had no
warmth .

They were numb and asleep and had no life in them.  He could feel the
core of his chest begin to cool.

This is it, Thomson.  You're going to be a brain.  A brain and nothing
else.

Then the cold began to retreat.  Bob felt it had something to do with
his breath.  His breath seemed to get warmer.  The freezing snake
withdrew; where it retreated, he was racked with agony.  The thawing
flesh burned as if it were on fire.  The sensation of burning did not go
away as his stomach and arms warmed up; they warmed only to the point of
unfreezing.  The so-called hunter reflex.  As the body cools towards
freezing, the smooth muscle tissues around the veins tighten, cutting
off blood to the extremities.  The limbs freeze.  The same muscle
tissues that cut off the blood then lose their ability to contract,
because they are so cold.  They relax, and a trickle of blood returns,
giving the muscles the strength to contract again.  And so on, in an
excruciating ebb and flow.  So much for the gentle morphia of nature.

When his hand thawed, came back to him, it was on fire.  Bob brought it
to his face.  He did not know why he did this.  It seemed important to
feel his hand close to him.  It was his remaining friend.

The pain went away with the return of the snake.  Back and forth it
went; freezing and thawing, ice and fire.  A battle waged along his rack
of flesh.

Bob did not pick sides, particularly, but he admired his body's
performance.  When he viewed himself from afar, he was astonished at the
strength and endurance of his own body.

The snake returned, slithered up his arms and belly.  It moved into his
chest and coiled around his shoulders and neck.

This is it, Thomson.

He became deathly tired and felt himself about to drop off.

I'm going to sleep now.  This is the end of it.

Someone was curled up behind him, his front pressed against Bob's back.
A man.  Bob felt the man's heat and strength.  His face was pressed
against Bob's left ear, where the heel used to be.  His arm was Bob's
left arm.  His arm was strong.  Bob felt it embrace him, hugging him.

Hey, bud.

The man's voice was deeper than Bob's, and husky.

Who are you?

I'm Buddy.  What's up?

I'm tired, Buddy.  I'm scared.

What are you scared of?

Scared I'm going to suffocate.  Scared the tarp will get heavier and
push against my face.  It's right there, Buddy .

I can't breathe.  I can't breathe any more.

Hey, no problem.

Bob felt Buddy's arm fishing around in the cavity.

Don't you have a piece of metal or something?

Here.  Hey Buddy, if you can break us out of here, we're both going to
be all right.  We'll be free.

With his strong left arm, Buddy slit the tarpaulin open.

Bob was blinded.  He closed his eyes against the light .

Sunlight streamed through the vent.  Sunlight, heat, fresh air.  He felt
the sweet air fill his lungs.  The feathers were gone, he breathed
freely.  He opened his eyes and saw a measureless expanse of blue.
Summertime blue.  Dawn! He'd slept right through spring.  The air
smelled sweet, of cut grass and warm afternoons.

This is great, Buddy!  We can get out now!

Bob rose towards the light.  He soared through the opening towards the
blue sky.

There was no Buddy.

He was alone.  It was dark.

Thomson, you're an idiot.  How could you have done that?

His problems had vanished.  He had experienced joy .

Then it had been taken from him.  He began to cry.  He had not, until
now, cried.  Wetness flowed from his eyes and mouth and nostrils,
matting the feathers, and his desperation compounded itself on the
choking feathers and the dark.  He gasped, heaving with sobs; and as he
cried, he drew a draft of cool, dry air.

He poked his tongue out, exploring the canvas.  There was a small slit,
cut by his metal spar.  Fresh air was flowing through it.  The air
rejuvenated him.  He felt his strength return.  His body pushed back the
snake; fire returned to his arms and belly.

He was suffering.  He would live.

Thanks, Buddy.

Sue had heard someone through the wind, had seen the beam of light.

"Guys ogay?"

He sounded so cold; his voice was shaking, his words half-formed.

Okay."

"Godda go."

She was alone again.  Bob no longer talked to her.  He said he was
tired.  She imagined he had gone to sleep.

She was on her back, and the snow came in from the sides of her shelter.
It drifted over her face.  She waited until it was several inches thick
before brushing it away.  She didn't have the strength.  She let it pile
up until she could no longer breathe .

Then she found the strength and brushed it, as high as she could, to
either side.  Snow drifted back down the sides and covered her face
again.  She didn't have the strength.

She decided to get up.  She brushed the snow away, removed the
diesel-soaked rag.  She worked her elbows up her side, and actually
levered herself into a semi-upright position.  This was achieved at
great expense in pain.  She fought the nausea and the fainting.  She
believed her neck to be broken; it was too painful to support her head.
She leaned on one elbow, grabbed her collar with the free hand, trying
to support the neck.  She heaved on the collar and managed to poke her
head above the shelter.

Blackness.  The wind blasted her face, and ice spicules pricked her
skin.  It hurt, and then her face was numb.

She sank back down.  She couldn't move for quite a while.  She thought
about her pain for a long time.  It felt as if someone had cut off her
head with a guillotine.

She worked the rag back over her face.  The smell made her feel sick.
She wondered if she could still make her legs move.  She reached down
and tugged at one leg, trying to make it respond.  She felt the flesh
tearing, her hand being soaked in new blood.  Then she lay still.

She had, until now, made a routine of raising her back off the ice, to
save her kidneys and vital organs.  She did this by arching her hips and
raising herself on the points of her shoulder blades.  But her shoulders
had frozen and been rubbed raw against the ice.  She had felt the
frostbite enter them, felt the flesh being rubbed off the bones.  She no
longer arched her back.

She let the snake invade her.  It worked its way up her thighs, through
her groin, into her waist.  It entered her fingers and made its way up
her arms.  The back of her neck was her greatest pain; it did not go
numb.  She was reduced to the parts of her that were going numb, leaving
her, and the parts that remained, tormenting her.

The snow drifted over her mask, piling several inches high.  She let it.

She felt a flow of warmth and wetness between her thighs .

The urine turned to ice; it was barely out of her body when it froze,
sucking what little heat remained from her groin area.

This is it.  My kidneys are shutting down.  That's one of the last
signs.

She imagined her future, saw herself frozen in her ice coffin until
spring, when the thaw would reveal her body .

Perhaps the animals would get to her body first; in any case, she would
not be returned to her parents until spring.  She thought of the grief
this would cause them, felt their grief, and she cried, and heard the
having of wolves.

I'm not going out a nut case.  I'm going to be calm.

Sue prepared her list, including everyone who was important to her.  She
was a gregarious woman, and the list was long.  Her primary
relationships were at the top of the list.  She spent a long time
talking with her mother, and let her go.  Then she dealt with Adrian.
She had many things to say to them, private things.

She went to her father, and her sisters, visited with them.  Then her
relatives and her friends, her clients, everyone she was leaving behind.
She did not mind so much the going, but she wanted more than anything to
go on peaceful terms.  She made her peace, and she heard the snuffling
of an animal by her ear.

A polar bear?

It padded around the outline of her body.  She felt the weight of it on
the packed snow.  It walked the length of her, rounded her feet, and
came up the other side.

Maybe it will go away.

It stopped at her hips.  It began to dig.  She felt it digging towards
her hips and thighs, where the flesh was laid open to the bone.

It's the blood.  It's the same leg I was digging at.  It smells fresh
blood.  It would start there; it would start by gnawing at her hip bone.

Its snout entered the cavity it had dug, and snuffled for the blood. She
felt its breath on her skin.

It withdrew.

Nothing happened for a while.  Then it crept up her belly and chest. She
felt its paws.  It stopped, with its weight on her chest.  She heard it
panting.

Not without seeing my face.

She summoned the last of her will.  This was not courage but a type of
stubbornness.  She moved her hands, pulled the rag from her face.  Snow
fell into her eyes and mouth.  She lunged almost upright, ignoring the
stabbing protest from her neck.  Snow fell from her face.  She let out a
scream.

She opened her eyes, looked directly into his.  He blinked, once, and
pulled his head back; then he moved his nose towards her face.  Sue
pulled her head back in astonishment.  They considered each other.

A white arctic wolf, the most beautiful animal she had ever seen.  His
face was radiant, seeming to glow in the darkness.  His fur was long and
spiky, and there was soft white down underneath.  There was a black
flash running from his forehead down his nose.  His tongue was pink, and
white vapours marked his panting.

His eyes were striking-as striking as Sue's own.  A pale, iridescent
blue.  They shone.  They stared into Sue's eyes, neither malicious nor
curious.  They simply regarded her.

Sue screamed again.

The wolf cocked his head.  He turned, not hurriedly, and stepped off her
chest.  He padded away, stopping once for a final look back.  Then he
disappeared into the darkness.

Sue sank back.

I'm not dying here.  And I'm not getting eaten by some wolf.  I'm not
freezing to death.  If I have to, I'll crawl to Alert.

Sue went back to the people on her list, starting from the top.  She
told them she'd be coming home.

Riders on the Storm

It was somehow comforting, Captain Mare Favre thought, to be using the
same technology used by Magellan .

Favre stood on the crew bunk of the Hercules flight deck, sextant in
hand.  It was the first instrument he had learned to use, and his
favorite.  His poked his head into the ceiling bubble of the cockpit. As
Mary Macauley took the Hercules up through the cloud cover, Favre found
himself in a sea of stars.  It was a brilliant night-he never would have
guessed it from the suffocating storm below.

Favre set his sights on Vega.  He took the reading and consulted the
ancient logs and almanacs.  Fifteen minutes later, the Herc's compasses
had been trued.  Mary descended back through the clouds, down to 2,500
feet, and raised the American Hercules on the radio.

" We're coming down to your altitude."

"All yours, Rescue Three Zero Five,'said the U.S.

aircraft commander ." There's no way we're going to jump into that.  You
go ahead and be crazy, if you want."

When the U.S.  Here banked away, Mary dove in to take its place.  This
would have to be fast; he was worried.  He was fast approaching bingo
fuel for Thule, which would mean no other airfield but Alert.

In the rear, Arnie's SARtechs pulled on their white balaclavas, snugged
their helmets, and snapped down the visors.  They checked their
parachutes and rigging.  Some put an orange in a pocket, for the
survivors, or a flask of whisky.  One carried his lucky mittens, knitted
for him by his mother.

The weather had completely socked in during their quarter-hour absence.
The crash site was again enveloped by cloud, rising to 4,500 feet.  Mary
ordered a light and flare drop from the aircraft, hoping to pinpoint the
site .

Both were blown away by the wind and never seen again .

To hell with it; they'd thrown over ninety flares by now and knew the
wind speed and drift by heart.

Mary could find the site by homing beacon, but the jumpers needed light.
He decided on an untried method: he would drop the flare at 5,500 feet,
three-quarters of a mile upwind of the crash site and above the cloud
layer.  Then he would bring the aircraft around and dive into the cloud,
keeping the flare on his left.  Then he'd race ahead of the flare,
flying downwind to the crash site.  Once he got a fix on the wreckage,
he'd double back and drop his jumpers with the flare still in the air,
but out of harm's way.

Mary had dropped and circled a flare in cloud once before, with nearly
disastrous results.  This time he would set himself a vector to give
himself plenty of clearance.  The real problem was time.  The flare
burns for five minutes, but the drop is cancelled if the jumpers aren't
out the door within three.  Otherwise the flares will burn out before
the jumpers hit the ground, and it is perilous to land in total
darkness.

At the moment of ignition, the navigator began a count .

Mary had precious little time to get the Herc in position.

In the rear, the SARtechs had a countdown of their own .

As they doubled back over the crash site, the jumpmaster began counting
the number of seconds before the first six jumpers would leave the door.

The Hercules dived and banked, raced the flare, and doubled back as the
navigator called the time on the cockpit intercom: "Two fifteen.  Two
thirty.  Two forty-five."

In the tail, the jumpmaster counted down over the roaring wind: 'Ten.
Niner.  Eight.  Seven.  Six..."

At five seconds to drop, the navigator called three minutes.  'Stop
drop"

The l'llmpmaster stretched his arm across the open door: 'Stop drop!"

Arnie tore off his helmet in a rage and asked what the hell had
happened.  'Three minutes,"said the jumpmaster .

"No flares."After a quick conference with his SARtechs, Arnie grabbed
the intercom mike to the flight deck: 'We're doing it again, Mary. We've
talked it over back here.  We are not, under any circumstances, calling
a stop drop again."

Mary knew that tone of voice, knew there was no point arguing with his
older brother, even if it was practically a suicide mission they were
contemplating.

"All right'the said, and began the climb back to 5,500 feet.  He felt
oddly calm, except that his upper lip was twitching uncontrollably.

Addressing his men, Arnie had to make himself heard above the droning
engines, the rushing wind, and the cockpit commands coming over the
intercom.

"Okay, guys, you know the situation.  The winds are pretty stiff.
They've blown away all our marker lights.  The count is thirty seconds
from one thousand feet.  The drop zone is about a half-mile wide.  It
looks like a snowfield down there, but ground conditions are unknown.
We'll be landing at a good clip.  We'll try for flare illumination but I
can't promise you anything.

"One more thing.  Once we're down there, we're down for good.  Mary will
try for a supply drop, but we can expect the survival gear to be blown
away.  We'll have no way of extracting ourselves or the survivors."

A thirty-second count at 1,000 feet meant the SARtechs would drift one
and a half miles horizontally for 1,000 feet

of vertical travel.  They would have an eight-to-one glide slope, a
slope angle of 11 degrees.  They would be travelling nearly parallel to
the ground when they hit it.

The winds were more than three times greater than operational limits.
Depending on whether their canopies were running with the wind or
against it, they would strike the ground at between thirty-five and
forty-five knots.  It would be like leaping from a moving car at a speed
of between forty and fifty-two miles an hour.

The SARtech rulebook forbids jumping in wind speeds above ten knots.  It
also forbids night jumps without illumination.  It also forbids any jump
below 2,000 feet.

They would be hitting the ground at highway speed, with a visibility of
ten to twenty feet in blowing snow.  They would not be able to see the
ground or adjust their direction before they hit.  There would be no
time to use the reserve chute if the main canopy failed or tore in the
wind.  The jump would be conducted at airspeeds of up to 150 knots .

Stepping out of the aircraft, they would be plunged into darkness and
the unimaginably icy blast of the slipstream .

The temperature on the ground, with wind chill, was -66 Celsius.  They
would be hurled into the wind's fury and dropped into a frozen hell.  If
the count were off by seconds, or if Mary's aim were off by degrees,
they would miss the snowfield altogether and be dashed against the
surrounding rocks and boulders.

"That's the situation, men.  We can expect casualties.  I have to inform
you that the jump involves a knowing risk of life.  I can't ask any of
you to do this."

Some of the SARtechs studied their boots, others looked out the open
door into the howling void.  One by one, they looked back at him ."
Arnie," one said ." You know how we feel."

Good guys, Arnie thought.  I hope like hell I'm doing the right thing.

Arnie checked the closures on his padded orange jumpsuit and the
fasteners of his parachute harness.  He pulled on his gloves.  The
jumpmaster clipped their static lines to the overhead cable, and the men
crowded around the open door.  There were six of them.  They squeezed
into the opening and grabbed one another by the legs, arms, waist.  They
would go together.

On the flight deck, Mary was struggling with his face .

It was a funny feeling; he'd never had a nervous twitch.  His upper lip
had started to quiver so much he thought everyone in the cockpit must
have noticed it.

He briefed the flight crew on headings, altitudes, and times.  The
copilot, Randy Price, would call the headings .

The flight engineer, Sergeant Bill Sura, would call altitude and
airspeed.  The navigator, Favre, would check ground clearances and
follow terrain and flares.  Mary would fly the plane.

The homing beacon on the ground was dying out.  Price had the UHF
receiver turned to full volume, and Mary had to speak over its
undulating distress call.  It sounded like the sonar return of a
submarine; it was growing more smeared and faint: "Ping.  Ping.  Ping."

"Turn that thing off,"Mary said ." Stop using the homer."

Price cut the volume to the pilot's headset.  But he did not flip the
power toggle; the direction finder was left on, and its track bar still
pointed towards the crash site.  Price reached for another dial and
boosted the sensitivity of the needle.  He didn't fully trust his tacan
instrument, he told himself, he wanted a second opinion.  But he also
wanted contact with the survivors.  His way of reaching for them was
through a small needle on the instrument panel.

Mary broke cloud cover at 4,500 feet, and they dropped the flares from
the tail.

"Flare away."

"Clear."

"Ignition."

The navigator began the three-minute count.  Mary dropped the left wing
and began racing the flare through cloud.  Price called vectors.  Favre
called clearances from the flare and the crash site.  The flight
engineer called airspeed and altitude.  Mary's eyes were fixed on the
dials, his hands on the yoke.  His tongue was reaching out and grabbing
his mustache.  He figured he could stop the lip from quivering by
pulling on the mustache.

At 2,500 feet, they broke through the bottom of the cloud layer.  Mary
was surprised; it had been socked in down to the ground when they'd gone
up.  The flares pulsed their fountains of orange light over the rocks
and snow below.

Sergeant Gerry Dominic, jumpmaster of the Greenwood SARtechs, was lying
on the floor of the Here, his head poking out the SAR door, watching the
frozen waste pass beneath him.  The outline of the crashed tail section
hove clearly into view.

"Acquired crash site.  Five seconds to target.  Over target ...  now!"
He began his thirty-second count.

"Won't make it,' the navigator said.  'We're only fifteen seconds to
stop drop."

Mary had to decide.  He was low on fuel.  But the conditions were the
best he had yet experienced.  Arnie had said no more stop drops.  But to
drop in darkness, after the flares had gone out?  Madness.

"Prepare two flares to send after the jumpers,'said Mary.

"Deploy flares fifteen seconds after jumpers away .

There will be no stop drop.  Repeat: No stop drop."

This procedure wasn't in the books.  Bill Sura leaned over towards Mary
." Level and two,"he said.  'Airspeed one fifty.  Good old Mary."

Mary's head filled with voices on the headset: checklist, bearings,
flaps 50 percent, SAR doors open, deflector doors open, fifteen seconds,
level and two, speed one fifty, vector two niner.

Suddenly, the steady drone of the engines ceased and the flight deck
reverberated with a rising and rolling "wowowow'from the number one
engine.  The aircraft felt all right in Mary's hands, but something was
wrong .

"My God!  No RPM on number one!'

The four propellers of the Hercules are electronically phased to be kept
in synchronized rotation.  The tach generator for the number one engine
had failed, so the phaser no longer knew the speed of its propeller, or
its angle in relation to the masters.  The propellers lost their harmony
and reverberated; the gauge indicated the engine was dead.  The effect
is noisy and unsettling, but it does not affect the flight performance
of the aircraft.  Mary thought he'd been suckered, but he was wrong.

Flight engineer Sura scanned the dials and rested a reassuring hand on
Mary's shoulder ." We just lost the tach genny.  It's okay, the engine's
good."

"Five seconds to drop,' Dominie said over the headset.

Mary's twitch was lifting his entire lip, baring his upper teeth.  He
held the aircraft straight and level.

" Steady," Dominie said ." Three.  Two.  One..."

Of the many ways a pilot orients his aircraft, one involves, literally,
seat-of-the-pants flying.  From his years in a Labrador helicopter,
Randy Price was particularly sensitive to the messages sent by his seat:
pitch, roll, yaw .

In the Hercules, he could feel the exit of a single pair of jumpers. The
plane told him when the jumpers left the aircraft; he felt it as a
twitch in his buttocks.  This time, as six jumpers left at once, he felt
the Hercules sigh.

Arnie could see nothing from the open doorway.  He felt the arms of his
comrades being ripped away and felt the static line yank his chute open.
He was torn by the roaring wind for a second, then became a part of the
wind.  He felt no cold.  He saw nothing on the ground.  He turned this
way and that, but there was nothing in the eerie gloom.  He was bathed
in orange light from the fading flare.  Ice crystals and fog streaked
past his eyes.

He was down to 300 feet when he saw it heading his way through the icy
mist.  It was solid and dark.  It rushed towards him; he fell towards
it.

It was the tail of the Here.  They were on a collision course.  Arnie
pulled on his right toggle to steer his way past the flat of the tail.

The tail flashed past.  Man, near miss.  Amie was reflecting on his good
fortune and grabbing his capewell releases, to pop his parachute as soon
as he landed, when his helmet was driven, as if by sledgehammer, into
his face.  He bounced; his parachute lifted him back up into the air as
his body twisted behind the shroudhnes.The first bounce carried
him&Myards, then he bounced again.  He popped a capewell, and rolled to
a stop.  The parachute sighed, fluttering noisily in the gale.

Arnie lay spread-eagled on the snow.  After a time he was able to draw
air into his lungs, fighting the pain in his ribs.  The survivors, for
all he knew, were dead.  His team was still in the air.  For a moment,
it felt as if he was the only human being at the Pole.

Then he looked up and saw the most beautiful sight .

The second set of flares was pulsing against the base of the cloud.  The
outline of the Hercules was starkly drawn .

Other jumpers, still airborne, were lined up in a row.  He wished for a
camera.

The jumpers passed a few feet overhead, then bounced .

He heard their sudden anguish as the wind was knocked out of them.  They
were dragged at a terrific rate across the snow; the ground barely
slowed them.  Their parachutes sagged, and one by one they got to their
feet.

Arnie looked towards the crash site behind him.  Where was the downed
airplane?  He saw the overturned wing and thought it must have been the
remains of the fuselage.  The severed tail loomed in the orange murk. It
was still; no one came out to greet them.  With a sinking heart, Arnie
realized they were all dead.

Mary, meanwhile, was putting distance between the jumpers and the coming
flares.  The more height and distance he could put between them, the
safer they would be from burning magnesium.  He thrust the four throttle
levers full forward, reefed back the control yoke, and began a climb to
the left.  The Hercules heeled over at a 45-degree angle, and its nose
heaved upwards.

The loadmasters in the back were not prepared for the manoeuvre.  They
knew Mary could really yank the Hercules around, but this was a muscular
move even so.  The loadmasters, Master Corporal Chuck Coutts and Master
Corporal James Norris, were being helped with the gear by one of Arnie's
SARtechs, Corporal Keith McKellar.

McKellar's nose was out of joint.  He had trained as a medical
assistant, but tired of pushing laundry carts; SARtech work gave him the
satisfaction he'd sought in medicine.  Now, though, at a time when he
could have been saving souls, Dominie had awkwardly placed an arm around
his shoulder: "Keith, I need somebody to stick around and help with the
flares and kit.  What do you think about that?"

"Goddamn you, Gerry," McKellar had told his higher rank ." You know damn
well I want out of this airplane.  But if you're looking for someone to
stick around, I'll do it." McKellar had been chosen for his physical
conditioning and knowledge of the Hercules.  Together with the heavyset
Coutts, he was responsible for retrieving the deployment bags, which
envelop the parachutes until the actual jump tears the bags off.  There
is a motorized cable for retrieving the static lines and bags; but the
loadmasters wanted the cable available for the next jump, in case one of
the parachutists got hung up.  On this jump, they had to retrieve the
six bags manually, yarding them in against the tremendous pull of the
slipstream.  In a normal procedure, the pilot waits for the loadmaster
to say, "Bags in." Then, with the doors closed, he follows up by saying,
'Clear to turn."

This was not a night for normal procedure.

Coutts had his hands on the static line when Mary banked the airplane
sharply; McKellar was braced against the door.  Behind them, Norris held
a magnesium flare in his arms.  He'd set the timer; the flare was armed.
The cabin became a funhouse, the floor banking and the nose pitching up.
McKellar had a foothold by the open door.  The icy wind blasted him.  He
grabbed the lines, and heaved.  He had one leg on either side of the
open door of a pitching Hercules and he was yarding in cable with all
his strength .

Coutts, struggling to keep his balance, wrapped his arms around
McKellar, grabbed the lines, and heaved also.

The bags were out the side of the aircraft, and had become wrapped
around the high lobster tail of the Hercules.  The climbing bank was
working against them .

Finally they got the bags through the doorway in a sudden rush, and
McKellar and Coutts fell in a tangled heap to the floor.  Norris stepped
over them, the live flare tube in his arms, trying to brace himself.

McKellar was in Norris's way.  He imagined Norris tripping over him, the
timer winding down, the flare chute firing, the lanyard pulled, the
spray of magnesium.  He scrambled out of the way, ending up on top of
Coutts.

Coutts grabbed McKellar by the hair, drawing him close and looking in
his eyes ." Keith," he said tenderly.  'I didn't know you felt this
way."

Once the flares were out the door and ignited, Mary began flying a
pattern for the delivery of the second stick Of SARtechs, while waiting
for word from the ground.  They were less than thirty minutes from bingo
fuel.

Mary recalled his argument with Arnie at Thule.  Arnie had probably been
among the first set of jumpers.  Whatever had happened, had already
happened.  If Arnie was lying in a heap, his brains bashed out on a
chunk of shale, well, he'd done his best for his big brother.  He hadn't
called a stop drop.

The radio was quiet.  How it was quiet.  Mary waited five agonizing
minutes before he finally heard his brother's voice on the headset:
"Rescue Three Zero Five."

Mary's nervous twitch ceased as abruptly as it had started.

"Nice soft landing,' said Arnie ." Plenty of snow on the ground.  Send
down another five jumpers."

The cockpit crew looked at one another and started shouting and cheering
like sophomores.  Mary caught himself yelling, "Yahoo!  Goddamn!'

Price transmitted the reply: 'Good work, Arnie.  Second stick on the
way."

The SARtechs on the ground, all injured but none debilitated, watched
the second stick of jumpers sail down towards them.

There were more minor injuries, but everybody was able to gather their
chutes and join the first group of SARtechs.

"Spread out,' Arnie told them.  'Get ready to receive the gear." He
spoke into his hand radio: 'Ready to receive supplies, Mary."

Mary was now less than twenty minutes from bingo fuel, and the weather
conditions at Alert were iffy.  He had less than twenty minutes to drop
the supplies and attempt a landing in the heavy crosswinds at Alert.  If
he missed the approach, he might have enough fuel for one approach at
Thule.  He called over the intercom to the Toadies and SARtechs in the
rear: 'One pass.  You've got thirty seconds to get everything out.  Drop
it all."

There was well over a ton of equipment in the back, tied down with
restraining straps.  Jim Norris went over the bundles, checking
parachutes.  Chuck Coutts grabbed a thick, razor-sharp cutaway knife;
the other men heaved, and they emptied the guts of the Hercules in
record time .

Everything went out the tail: SAR toboggans, B-25 personal survival
bundles, chainsaws, stretchers, penetration kits, camp kitchens, tents,
stoves, heaters, food, water, blankets, fuel, medical toboggans.  In a
moment of unrestrained, Santa-like generosity, Coutts even slashed the
straps of the SKAD kits-Sea Kits, Air Droppable-for saving ships in
distress.  He thought they might come in handy.

On the ground, in the howling darkness, Arnic radioed the flight deck:
"We're ready, Mary.  Drop the supplies any time."

The weather had closed again.  The SARtechs on the ground hadn't seen a
single bundle fall from the sky.

When told that the loads were already down, Arnie shouted at his men to
fan out downwind.  They needed a survival toboggan, but the canopy
release mechanism on the SAR toboggans was a bad piece of kit; it
released the canopy only when there was slack in the shroud lines.  In
this gale, the parachutes would not cut away; the toboggans would be
pulled across the frozen ground at wind speed-forty knots.

Arnie squinted into the storm and caught the faint bllilking of a strobe
light.  It was a survival toboggan, all right, but it was too far off,
and traveling too fast, for him to reach.  He shouted at one of the
SARtechs who was closer: "Errr-ic!  Toboggan!"

Corporal Eric Larouche sprinted in the direction his team leader had
indicated.  Larouche was twenty-eight years old, formerly an infantryman
of the 22nd Regiment, and weighed 165 pounds.  Despite whiplash and a
sprained back from the jump, he was fit in body and possessed an
intrepid spirit; but he did not have any firm idea of how he was going
to stop a 300-pound steel toboggan being towed towards him by a
thirty-two-foot canopy across snow and ice at highway speed in the dark.

Perhaps he could get in front of it and grab the canopy by its nose.  As
the toboggan sailed past, the canopy would point into the wind and
deflate.  That was the theory, anyway.  On the other hand, the parachute
might rip from his hands, or he might not be able to grab it in time, or
he might approach it from the side.  In that case, Larouche thought he
might leap onto the toboggan, rather like trying to mount a runaway
horse.  He had no idea what he would do after that.  He would ride the
toboggan and see what came next.

The strobe light had died, the flares had died, and Eric Larouche found
himself running blind in a storm after a rogue toboggan.  He heard the
sound of panting above his own.  He saw the white flank come heaving out
of darkness, saw the flank rise and fall with its panting breath.
Terrified, he spun on his heels and took off in the opposite direction.

"Bear!" he shouted.

Arnie noticed the beam from Larouche's miner's lamp bobbing towards him.

" What?"

"Polar bear!  It's after me!'

Shit, Arnie thought.  The rifles are all in the rescue toboggans.  He
took off with Eric.  They ran for their lives, side by side, past the
other SARtechs, who looked on in astonishment.

" Bear!  Run!"

The SARtechs all sprinted away from the crash site, away from the bear.
But they didn't run fast enough.  Arnie saw it first, heard steel
hissing against snow, saw the white nylon canopy swell and fall in the
wind.  The toboggan raced past and disappeared into the darkness, never
to be seen again.  Larouche collapsed, catching his breath.

Arnie stopped, too, panting.  We're shit out of luck, he thought.  We've
got nothing but the clothes on our backs .

Our personal medical kits are frozen.  We've become eleven more
survivors somebody has to bail out.

"Way to go, Eric," said Arnie.

The other SARtechs realized what had happened.  Eric had thought the
billowing chute of the toboggan was a polar bear.

"Right.  Way to go, Bearic!'

"Yo, Bearicl'

The SARtechs waved their arms and pretended they were bears rampant.
They lumbered menacingly towards Larouche.  They growled and romped on
the snow in a howling storm, dancing bears in orange jumpsuits.

"Hey, Bearic!  Run!"

"I'm going to eat you, Bearic!'

"Woof, woof!  Roaaarl"

It was 66 below and they were a bunch of guys on top of the world.

The Nick of Time

"Black" said one of the SARtechs.  Code for dead .

"Another one.  Another black."

The tail, Arnie thought.  The others must have gone inside the tail and
died there.  He made for the tail section, hunched against the storm,
calling: "Hello?  Hello?"

The wind was in his face; there were no voices on the wind.  He reached
the entrance of the tail and shouted: "Anybody in there?"

Aw, shit.  After all this.

"Hey!  Anybody hear me?"

"Ahhss."

Was that a noise?  It sounded like something between a hiss and a moan.

"Anybody here?"

Thevoice'struggling with the word "Yes,"would have alarmed a less
composed man.  It was an old voice, thickened almost beyond recognition
by pain and cold.

"How many?  How many are you?"

"Leven."

Eleven.  That's what he'd said.  Hot dog!  Arnie felt something
marvelous.  He tried to focus on the feeling, pin it down.  It was joy.

"In here, boys!  Let's go!"

Arnie told his men to rig chutes over the opening.  He stepped inside.
He stepped on someone, who moaned in agony.  He cast the beam from his
headlamp around the tail, lighting walls thick with ice and a huddled
mass of humanity, filthy and black. They looked like rats in a stinking
hold.  The tail smelled of burnt things, fuel, and urine.  It smelled
like a crash site.  It smelled wonderful.

One of Arnie's SARtechs stepped in beside him.

"Careful," Arnie said ." The floor's alive."

There was a shuffling movement.  Someone said some thing.

" Who's that?"

One of the figures lifted its head.  Arnie shone his light .

The man's face was streaked and grimy, the skin beneath the smudges
white as snow.  The lips were grey, or blue.  The man looked like the
risen dead.

"Smee."

"Jesus.  I know you."

Paul West's ghastly face blinked in the beam of light .

"Whos air?"

"I'm Arnie Macauley.  I'm the SARtech leader from Greenwood.  And these
are my boys."

Other survivors were beginning to come around; cutting the wind from the
tail was already having an effect.  So was the human presence.  The
SARtechs heard curious, nonsensical mumbles.  They moved carefully about
the tail and went gently to work.  They spoke to the survivors and
listened to them babble on, in voices thick and slow.

One of the SARtechs pulled a pair of mittens over the hands of a
survivor ." It would be a privilege for me to give you these," he said,
with odd formality ." My mother made them for me."

Many of the survivors, returning to themselves, began to cry
uncontrollably.  Many of the SARtechs, without ceasing to work, cried
with them, wrapping them in parachutes.  Every survivor was in the
severe, final stage of hypothermia, perched on the thin ledge between
stupor and death.  Methodically, expertly, the SARtechs went about the
delicate task of helping them off that ledge.

Joe had met so many nice people in the white room, people he had longed
to see.  Sometimes a person would come into the room that he didn't want
to see, and Joe could make the person go away.  Then a man came into the
room dressed in an orange coverall, with a bright eye in the middle of
his forehead.  Joe wished him to go away, but the man remained.

The man was tucking something around him.  Joe resisted, but then
something shifted in his mind and he recognized the orange jumpsuit as
that of aSARtech, the glowing eye as a lamp.  So that was it.  He had
been rescued.

He received his deliverance with the same detached interest he'd had in
his imminent death.

There were hands on her, soft fabric being tucked around her chin. Wilma
felt she was being cared for, and nothing else mattered.  Of all the
balm to follow-the warmth, the morphine, the hot water, the Magic Pantry
dinner or the Hershey chocolate bars-none was worth as much as that
first human touch.

SARtechs are well aware of the importance of this touch and are as
gentle in their way as lovers.  They know the profound release that
follows on rescue, and describe it as rescue shock; many souls have been
lost at this point.  Like all matters of desolation and love, rescue is
a delicate business.

Wilma could not relax; there was something on her mind, struggling to
get out: the others.

"The others.  In the snow."

More voices joined in, slurred voices that sounded drugged and surreal:
Yes.  The others.  Get the others.

Arnie worked his way over to Paul West's feet, then slid up beside him.
Paul seemed to be the only lucid one.

"There's two blacks out there," Arnic said quietly ." Is that who they
mean?"

"Smore.  Two more."

West gave directions as best he could, and Arnie sent a detail to search
the snow.

"You did good, Paul."

West tried to smile, but couldn't.  He tried to shake his head, but
couldn't.  He tried to whistle, but couldn't.  He tried to speak, and
what came out might have been, 'Nick of time, boys.  Nick of time."

Smokey Blair was at home in Edmonton, sleeping, when the phone rang.  It
was Friday night.  He had slept on Tuesday night.

" RCC, sir,' said the duty officer.

"Yeah?" said Blair groggily ." What is it?"

"Message from the command post at Alert, sir.  Alert advises at zero
five fifty-five Zulu that Six SARtechs from Rescue Three Zero Five have
penetrated crash site." Someone in the bedroom was making a lot of
noise.

Blair realized he was making the noise.  He was screaming .

He took a moment to get a grip.

Five fifty-five Zulu was five minutes to one in the morning at Alert.
The survivors had been on the ground thirty-two hours and thirty
minutes.

"Sir?" the duty officer asked.

"What's the status of our helo resources?"

The duty officer explained that Rescue 315, the 424 Squadron Labrador
helicopter, had reached Ellesmere Island from Trenton.  It was enroute
from Grise Fjord to Eureka.  The American c-5 Galaxy had unloaded the
two Pavehawk helicopters at Thule, and they were preparing for departure
to Alert in a few hours.  The Edmonton Twin Huey helicopter had just
arrived at Alert, in the belly of the Hercules, and they would start
assembly any minute.

"Get a helicopter in there," Blair said ." Keep the MAJAID Here on
stand-by.  Find out the status of the ground search party.  And see if
we can get more jumpers down."

Blair dressed and headed back to work.  Wonderful news, better than he
could have hoped for.  But they weren't out of the woods yet.

After dropping Arnie's SARtechs and the supplies, Mary made Alert on his
first approach and landed on bingo fuel.  The propellers of his Hercules
had not wound down when the sAR doors opened and the three remaining
SARtechs on board sprinted across the tarmac through the storm, carrying
their parachutes.  They were running towards the Edmonton Hercules under
the command of Major Jim Burger.

Burger was warming up for takeoff, with the other half of Fred Ritchie's
SARtechs on board.  They were under the stern command of-well, Jim Brown
was the team leader .

The Greenwood SARtechs piled in with the Edmonton team.

"Thought you might need a hand,' said Gerry Dominic .

"We did a thirty-second count from a thousand feet.  The boys damn near
hit the tail."

The Edmonton Hercules took off and set up an orbit around the crash
site.  The jumpmaster led the same recital Arnie had given his men.

Jim Brown could see the man's lips moving.  Earphone cords snaked up
underneath his 'Explosive' helmet and into his ears.  If you got close
enough, you could hear the tinny beat, even over the racket of the
Hercules.  He had a Walkman in his pocket.

It was clear what the man was saying.  He was saying this is the end. He
was saying desperately in need of some stranger's hand, in a desperate
land.  He was saying riders on the storm.  He was saying the snake is
old, its skin is cold.

He said ride the snake.

Brown clicked off the cassette, ending the Doors concert.  He said to
the jumpmaster, 'Let's do some work." There was some dispute, later on,
as to how low the Hercules was to the ground when Jim Brown led his men
out the door.  Certainly lower than Arnie's jump had been.

The most experienced SARtech on the deployment estimated their height at
500 feet; consulting maps, Arnie later calculated 400 feet.  One-fifth
the minimum for a night jump.  There is also some dispute as to where
they landed .

It was somewhere far from the crash site.

The men left the door in such a tight bundle that Gerry Dominie nearly
collided with another SARtech, Keith McKellar.  He was close enough to
shout, "Turn off!' Despite the roaring wind, McKellar heard him. Dominie
was close enough that he could see McKellar's face.  Dominie turned into
the wind; McKellar ran with it.

Both men thought they had collided with each other when they hit the
ground.  McKellar, who whacked the frozen terrain at forty-five knots,
thought he had collided with Dominie because he never felt his feet
touch the ground.  He felt only the emergency chute on his chest
cracking his ribs, and his helmet being driven into the bridge of his
nose.  Then he felt himself take off across the snow.  He had no idea
how long he'd been dragged along when he finally managed to pop his
capewells.

He didn't get up right away.  Dominie came over to him.

"Hey, buddy, you all right?"

McKellar rolled over on his back, groaning ." Fuck,' he said through the
pain of broken ribs ." Isn't this exciting?" Getting to his feet,
McKellar said he thought his ribs were cracked.  Dominie said that was
too bad.  As they carried the parachute bundles between them, McKellar
nearly fainted.  He asked Dominie to switch sides.  He felt better after
that.

Everybody was banged up.  The team got together and agreed they had no
idea where they were.  Jim Brown had an idea.  He used musk-ox logic.

"Everybody stand in a circle, facing out," he said ." I'll call down a
flare."

He reached the Hercules on his radio, and the aircraft dropped a flare.

"I see it!" said a sARtoch on one side of the circle.

"I see it!" said a SARteCh on the other side.

Some weird kind of polar illusion?  What had happened, in fact, was that
Fred Ritchie's ground party had sent up a flare at the same time that
the Hercules had dropped one.  Brown was stumped.

"Let's forget that happened," he said, and called for another flare.

The team broke into twos and began to leapfrog their way towards the
crash site.  The first pair would get about twenty paces ahead of the
others, and be lost from sight .

The third pair would then overtake the first, and so on.  The system was
hopeless.  They asked constantly for flare correction.  When a flare was
dropped, they tried to get in a straight line.  Dominie peered ahead at
Brown.

"Okay!" he shouted ." Stop moving!"

"I'm not moving," said Brown.

One of the SARtechs saw a flash of white at the edge of the gloom.  It
scared him.

"Jesus Christ!  A polar bear!"

Too small for a bear.  But something.

Joe Bales had recovered enough to sit up.  He had a parachute bundled
around him.  Arnie kneeled beside him, pressing his ear to Bales' lips,
and followed Bales' pointing finger.  The poor man was white as a ghost.
He was desperate .

You could tell he was being as purposeful as he could be.

"Air," Bales said ." By him."

"That one?" asked Arnie, pointing to a headlamp.

"Him.  His right."

Arnie left Joe to rest and went over to the SARtech ." The copilot says
they're around here somewhere.  He says they were alive a few hours
ago."

The SARtech looked at him sceptically ." I've been over this stretch a
hundred times, hollering."

"Go over it a hundred more," said Arnie.

Bob and Sue were shouting in their tombs.  Both had heard strange voices
and started to call out at once.  Each was surprised to realize that the
other was alive.

"Here!" they called.  'We're a!"

One of the search party thought he heard something .

He walked downwind.

"Where are you?" he hollered into the wind.

"Here!  We're here!"

The SARtech walked about in the storm, seeing nothing but crusted snow
and rock.  He passed within a few feet of them more than once.

"I can't see you!  Where are you?"

Bob still had his one good hand.  He closed it around his little metal
spar.  He still had one good hand and a metal spar.  He tried to poke at
the tarpaulin.

The SARtech thought he saw something move under the snow.

Arnie saw the lights of Fred's Go-Track rising up the hill towards them.
He sent a SARtech over to stop them at the perimeter ." Walk them in
here.  We don't want them driving over any bodies."

Arnie was deeply satisfied.  Now they'd have heat, light, and shelter.
Fred had rescued him.

When the tractors were still about a hundred yards away, Arnie ran over
at a trot.  Fred piled out the passenger door of the Go-Track.

They regarded each other.

Arnie had this loopy smile, but he didn't know what to say.  He turned
and waved towards the tail.

"We could use a windbreak, Fred."

"Arnie."

Fred held out his hand.  Arnie shook it.  Then they wrapped their arms
around each other.

"Hell of a place for old friends to meet."

Mike Kobayashi, one of Fred's SARtechs, scrambled out of the Go-Track;
he wanted to walk in on his own.  He let the vehicles pull away, then
started towards the crash site.

He could see the tail rising above him, in stark silhouette against the
pulsing backdrop of orange light.  Figures moved about busily,
methodically, eerily lit.  It was silent, except for the rush of the
wind.

He caught a shimmer out the corner of his eye; he turned slowly, not
knowing what to expect.  He'd thought he was alone.

The wolf regarded him for a few moments.  Then it turned, trotting, and
vanished.

At the station in Alert, the airframe crew from 408 Squadron guided the
stripped-down Twin Huey from the tail ramp of the Hercules that had
flown it up from Edmonton.  They pushed it, on its rickety trolley, to
the battery maintenance shed.  It was a tight fit.  They had four inches
clearance on either side.

The shed was equipped with a single overhead crane and a furnace.
Everything else needed to assemble an aircraft they had brought with
them.  When the doors of the shed opened, it took thirty seconds for
flesh to freeze to metal.  It took a half hour to warm the place up
again.  The door had to be opened frequently, to move the helicopter
around.

They were five men and one woman.  The lead airframe technician,
Sergeant Terry Sheppard, asked the crew if they wanted to start work
right away or sleep first.  Corporal Dave Gunn spoke for them all:
"They're out there in the cold, and they're hurt.  We're in here, warm
and fine.  Let's do it, boss."

They started to build the aircraft at two o'clock in the morning.  In
Edmonton, it had taken a crew of sixteen people with heavy equipment
eight hours to take it apart .

In a battery shed in Alert, it took a team of six, poorly equipped, five
hours to put it back together.

They worked like fiends.  They installed the right and left cyclic
control tubes.  They replaced the cowlings over the transmission and
both engine inlets.  They rewired three sets of antennae.  They
installed the right and left elevators .

They attached the tail rotor.  They dropped the main motor mast into the
transmission.  They placed the two rotor blades back into the hub
assembly, lifted the main rotor on top of the mast, rebuilt the main
rotor assembly.  They replaced the stabilizer bars.  When they had
rebuilt the helicopter from the engine up, they tightened the rotor to
the mast.  The blades of a helicopter are attached to the rotor hub with
a single lock pin.  The hub, in turn, is fastened to the transmission-to
the airframe, in fact with a single, crucial nut.  It is called the
Jesus nut, for various reasons.

They improvised.  They didn't have the precision jig for dropping the
blades into the hub, so they put the hub on a mattress and manhandled
the blades into place.  Each blade is sixteen feet long and weighs 230
pounds.  The blade is held in place with a restraining bolt tooled to a
fine tolerance.  The alignment is difficult, even with a precision jig.
They got it right, first time, on both blades.

They worked up a sweat.  The hub and rotor assembly weighs 760 pounds,
and the overhead crane didn't move from side to side.  They couldn't
line the Huey up underneath it, so they muscled the rotor.  They filled
it with fuel and called over the test pilot.  They were ready for
another sixteen hours' work, because a Huey never flies right the first
time after a re-assembly.  It needs to be fine-tuned, flown hard, and
fine-tuned again.  Never in Sheppard's experience had it flown right the
first time.

The test pilot gave it a shake-down flight around the airfield.  He took
it out over the bay.  He came back and reported, "Smooth as silk." It
was within the vibration tolerances.  They could start the evacuation of
survivors as soon as the helicopter was loaded with flares and aircrew.

Sheppard was floored.  It had never happened before, let alone with an
airframe exposed to that kind of vibration, knocking about, and
temperature changes.  It had been rush-loaded and flown through
turbulence.  It had been pulled out of the Hercules on a rickety trolley
pulled by a four-by-four truck with a cantankerous clutch.  It had been
slammed together.  They had put the blades together on a mattress.

One of Sheppard's mechanics came over, grinning .

"What was it, boss?  Was it the extreme cold?  How the hell could it fly
like that, first time out?"

Sheppard looked at the young fellow.  A man doesn't easily speak of such
things, but Sheppard didn't hesitate ." I have no doubt what it was.  In
my personal opinion, it was a higher power."

From the Labrador helicopter that had not been shut down since leaving
Trenton, 3,600 miles and thirty-seven hours earlier, Mark Levesque
spotted the lights of Eureka .

Last stop before Alert.

The latest leg had contained no more than the usual store of horrors.
The top-cover Aurora had left them in Grise Fjord, to fly south for
fuel.  The Labrador's crew had tired of waiting and decided to strike
off on their own.

They were going to zigzag up the island in two final strides.  From
Grise Fjord to Eureka was 180 miles; from Eureka to Alert was another
240 miles.  They looked at the charts.  Southern Ellesmere Island was
all fjords and mountains.  Fine.  They'd bound over mountains and dive
through fjords.

They got a little lost.  The wind blew them seventy nautical miles off
course, and they didn't know it.  Right about when their calculations
told them they were in a sealevel fjord, somebody saw a 6,700-foot
mountain peak looming like a shadow.  They climbed hastily to 7,700 feet
and kept the peak on their right side.

The Aurora returned and picked them up forty miles out of Eureka, giving
them a steer.  They landed at the small weather station, which had a
fuel cache but no pump.  The flight engineer broke out the hand pump and
started pumping from the barrels with the engine still firing .

Levesque got out and walked around.  His legs were wobbly.  The Labrador
had been airborne for thirty-seven hours, and he'd been at the controls
for too many of them.

He watched the engineer work.  The manual pump was spraying aviation
fuel over his hands, chest, and face.  The man worked on regardless.
Figure it out, Levesque thought .

They've got more energy now than when we left.  They're happy when they
should be miserable, happier than they would be at home in their beds.
Figure it out.

Levesque wobbled into the Eureka weather station and raised rescue
control.  He was now three hours away from Alert.  He was advised that
SARtechs had penetrated the crash site, that the Twin Huey was
flightworthy, and that he and his crew would not be needed for the
rescue.

Levesque replaced the handset.  He felt tired.  He felt happy and sad,
in a goofy sort of way.

Jim Brown poked around the crash site, looking at all the stuff.  The
snow was littered with stuff, mostly burnt stuff.  He went over to a big
drum and looked inside.  A few hundred gallons of diesel fuel were in
there.  Hadn't they built a fire?

Brown was getting cold, waiting for the helicopter to come and take them
out.  He threw a match in the drum.  It didn't catch.  So he got a
canister of naphtha gas from the fuel stoves and poured that in.  He
threw another match inside.

He backed up a hundred feet or so, in a hurry.

Fred Ritchie hurried out and looked at the flames licking the Arctic
sky.  The fire seemed to have answered the wind.  The storm was lifting;
the weather was clearing; the winds were dying down.

Fred said to Jim Brown, 'You're a crazy bugger.  Know that?"

The survivors were evacuated by Twin Huey.  The pair of American
Pavehawk helicopters arrived in time to take out the SARtechs and the
bodies of the five dead.  Alert became a busy place.  The survivors were
taken to the cafeteria, which had been partially given over to an
infirmary.

Steven Cann and the other Go-Track drivers were working up something of
a party at their barracks, the Monster House.  Arnie and the SARtechs
intended to go over; they figured they had earned a night of drinking
beer and talking big.  First they stopped at the warrants' and
sergeants' mess for a bite to eat.  The SARtechs had a boisterous table
of their own.  Jim Brown walked in carrying a fire extinguisher.  He
explained it away with some story about seeing a wolf outside.  There
were a lot of junior ranks around; no one was enforcing the rules.

One of the American para-rescue specialists walked over to the SARtech
table.  Arnie looked him up and down, admiring the man's equipment.  He,
too, was tall and wellbuilt.

"You the guys that jumped in there?" the American asked.

"We are,' said Arnie.

"You must be frigging crazy."

"No,' said Arnie.  'We're Canadians."

In the cafeteria, meanwhile, the survivors were recelying treatment and
waiting for the Herkie birds to take them home.  A full medical team was
busily doing what they could when word came that the first evacuation
flight to Thule was ready to go.  For the first time since the crash,
the survivors would be separated.

Wilma was laid out on her trestle in the cafeteria, thinking to George.
She was telling him the story, in her mind.  She looked around and
counted.  Thirteen.  There

were thirteen survivors, and they were all in the same room, all
together for the last time.  Sue and Bob had finally come in from the
cold.

Then she noticed Bill Vance.  Sweet Bill, who had rested his head in her
lap.  He had always been eager to keep the roll call going, even after
the spirits of the others had waned.  They had him wrapped in an
insulating blanket with an aluminum coating.  He looked like he was
wrapped in tin foil.

"Hey Bill, what are they doing?  Getting you ready for the oven?"

"Not comblaining,' he said with a smile.

The medical assistants stepped in.  It was time for him to go.

"Wade a minute," he said, and they stopped ." Hey, Wilma.  You going to
start with me?"

Wilma didn't understand at first, but Paul West did: "Call roll, Wilma."

A few of the other attendants stopped what they were doing and waited.
Wilma found she had to clear her throat .

She ran through all the names in her mind-the first set of four, the
second set of four, and then the flight crew, leaving off one name, poor
John.  Then adding the two who had been outside, Sue and Bob.  Thirteen
names.  Precisely.

"Bill," she began, but her voice was unsteady and didn't carry over the
background hubbub of the cafeteria .

As she composed herself, people began shushing one another, raising
fingers to lips.  Word spread from one person to the next, rippling out
across the room, until the whole cafeteria had fallen silent.

"Bill," said Wilma, in a clear, strong voice.

"Here," said Bill.

Epilogue

On March 19, 1992, the commander of the Canadian Forces Air Command,
Lieutenant-General Dick Huddleston, told a news conference at Air
Command in Winnipeg that a number of changes were planned as a result of
the crash of Box Top 22.  More survival gear kits would be placed on
transport aircraft, and they would be clearly marked with reflective
tape.  The Air Command was considering the obvious expedient of placing
the equipment in the tail, although there were concerns that this would
affect the aircraft's weight and balance.

SARtechs would receive ten global positioning units .

The first of the new square-canopy chutes, twelve years in the waiting,
were due to arrive in May.  They would be issued to SARtech parachute
instructors first.

The military was also considering the purchase of new Arctic sleeping
bags that could be opened, unlike the mummy style bags.  Testing is to
start in the winter of 1992-93 at the Arctic survival school in
Resolute, Northwest Territories.

The syllabus for the Hercules flight course was being revised, with
greater emphasis on cockpit communications and teamwork.  Aircrews were
to receive more Arctic survival training.  The military also committed
itself to improving the experience level on Hercules flight decks.

The Air Force has started a search for a better parachute for dropping
survival gear in high winds.  Delivery of a parachute with a canopy
release mechanism that actually works is expected to take about five
years.

Many recommendations have been submitted, at the time of writing, for
decorations for valour and bravery.  It is expected that the rescue of
Box Top 22 will be the most heavily decorated mission in Canadian
peacetime history.

Mark Levesque's Labrador flew one hundred hours before it finally conked
out.  It's probably some kind of record.  The directional gyro has now
been fixed.

The SARtechs had their party at the Monster House.  It was rare for so
many to get together at once, rarer still for them to be in such high
spirits.  They drank and danced and told one another they were heroes.
Then they returned to their unheralded jobs.  Fred Ritchie was carried
from the party in a Stokes litter.  The next day, standing
ramrodstraight in his dress blues, he gave a news conference in
Edmonton.

The Honda marine pump hasn't yet been returned to the Coast Guard. Arnie
Macauley had his hopes up for a pair of night vision goggles, but there
won't be any under the tree this year.

Fred and Arnie were both promoted, whether because of the way they
handled the rescue or in spite of it.  Both are now master warrant
officers.  Both have been transferred: Fred to Air Command Headquarters
in Winnipeg, and Arnie to Air Transport Group Headquarters in Trenton .

They initially resisted the notion of accepting jobs of greater
responsibility, because of the reduced fieldwork .

Both bowed to the inevitable.  In the spring of 1992, they celebrated
their friendship with an assault on the 19,500foot summit of Mount Logan
in Yukon.

Mary Macauley and Jim Burger returned to their regular flying duties.
Mary made it through the season without getting thrown off the Greenwood
SARtech hockey team.  At last sighting, he had just returned from a
midAtlantic rescue operation.  He was in the pilots' debriefing room,
dressed in his hockey sweater.

Among the SARtechs, Arnie had the final word on the rescue.  One night,
shortly after their audacious work at the North Pole had earned its
brief moment in the world's media spotlight, Arnie and Fred were being
interviewed by a reporter at Fred's home.  They sat over coffee at
Fred's kitchen table.  They spent many hours explaining what had
happened.

Towards the end of the interview, the reporter asked what a SARtech does
to relieve the tension after such a mission.

Drink beer, Arnie thought; but he decided that it wouldn't look good for
the Canadian Forces.  Fred thought of something that couldn't be printed
in a family newspaper.

But what about the post-stress debriefings, the reporter insisted.
Surely, SARtechs must have difficulty dealing with the traumas they
face.  Do they ever need professional help?

Arnie had, that same day, sent one of his men to the base counselor
because the man had taken the death of John Couch so badly.  Arnie had
recently lost another member of his team to suicide.  But he didn't
think he should mention either incident.

Well, the reporter finally asked, what about your dreams?  Do SARtechs
have nightmares after such an exploit?  Arnie looked incredulously at
the persistent reporter.

"SARtechs don't dream,' he said.

All the survivors of Box Top 22 have recovered at least partially and
returned to their lives.  The severe cold they endured proved both a
blessing and a curse.  Most of their grotesque lacerations and burns
healed rapidly and well, the result of an aseptic environment and
excellent medical care.  The eyesight of Private Bill Vance returned,
once his facial burns were treated.  Master Seaman Douglas Montgomery
fully regained his senses.  And Michael Moore's burned face also healed
well.

The cold injuries were another matter.  Although the SARtechs were
commended by base surgeons for their treatment of hypothermia and
frostbite, the ravages of the cold had already registered.  Frostbite
injuries heal slowly, when they heal at all; and the patient suffers the
same agonies as a burn victim.  Months after the accident, some of the
passengers were still in the long recovery from frostbite.  Although
some required surgery, all the military passengers expected to return to
their old duties eventually .

They were exempted from further service at Alert.

The surviving flight crew members of Box Top 22 returned to their former
duties, except for Sergeant Paul West.  He took a planned retirement
from the military to work in commercial aviation.

A memorial service with full military honours for the deceased was held
at the Kapyong drill hall at the Canadian Forces base in Edmonton,
attended by the Chief of Defense Staff, General A.J.G.D.  de Chastelain.
The padre prayed for the Lord's keeping, "until that day comes when we
shall no longer be alone, or in darkness, or in pain."

Wilma de Groot now practises medicine at the Canadian Forces base in
Trenton.  She spends long periods of time away from George, but he
somehow manages to stay in touch.  The night of the crash, he dreamed of
her.  When he reached out to her, she said, "I'm okay.  Leave me alone.
I have a lot of work to do." Although he did not communicate with her
again until after the `?08/' rescue, he had been alerted to her plight by her
brother, Peter, who was in British Columbia at the time of the crash. He
telephoned George, who was desperate at his inability to touch her mind,
and said: "She's alive.  She's broken her ankle and she's in pain.  But
she's alive." Peter had no way of knowing this by any scientifically
valid means.

Shortly after that phone call, George felt Wilma's reassuring presence;
a few hours after that, the padre telephoned to say that she had been
rescued.

Bob Thomson's wife, Elaine, had a similar experience.

She was speaking with the wife of Tom Jardine, who did not yet know she
was a widow, but who told Elaine unequivocally: "Bob's alive.  The two
civilians are outside, in the snow.  Either he can't walk or he can't
feel his legs .

But he's alive."

Bob spent six months in a rehabilitation centre in Ottawa following the
confirmation of paralysis and the amputation of his right leg below the
knee.  He has regained partial muscle control in the amputated leg and,
at the time of writing, had learned to crawl.  His experience has robbed
him neither of his indomitable spirit nor of his gentle nature.  Elaine
had already prepared their house for his homecoming.  She rejected his
suggestion that she leave him, and she is making plans for their
continued enjoyment of the outdoors.

Sue Hillier's mother, Marg, also had an inexplicable experience.  She
had been sipping cold coffee in the kitchen, where she had resisted her
temptation to tell Susan about an old woman's foolish dream, when Sue's
sister, Sandra, dropped a cup, then said: "She's not dead.  She's still
alive." Sandra's children, who were five and three years old, came into
the kitchen and, out of the blue, asked the adults why their Auntie
Susan was sleeping in the snow.

Sue bounced back rapidly from her injuries and regained her spirits and
vivaciousness.  The lingering pain of frostbite, however, has prevented
her from returning to her work as a hairdresser.

She thinks often of the wolf.  Bob Thomson never actually saw it, and
neither did he hear Sue screaming, but he was communing at the time with
Buddy.  There are many ways to consider the wolf.  The Inuit have wise
elders; perhaps a shaman paid a visit, although he would have had to
have been very strong, to travel so far and to take the form of a wolf .

Perhaps it was a dream.  Perhaps it was death come calling, then
deciding not to take her.  Perhaps it was merely a wolf, drawn by
curiosity or the scent of blood.

Sue was able to describe the wolf vividly; she recognized its markings
instantly.  She had a dog, a husky, whose coat was black with a white
flash.  The wolf was white with a black flash.  Both animals had unusual
eyes.  Sue's husky had brown eyes, translucent as a wolfs; the wolf had
the blue eyes of a husky.  Sue's husky and the wolf were positive and
negative images of each other.

Sue had no way of knowing it at the time, but her dog happened to
experience great distress while she was away .

It suffered kidney failure, and died at about the same time that she saw
the wolf.

Her dog's name was Angel.

Appendix

People and Resources

Listed here are the names of some of the people who played a significant
role in the flight, crash, and rescue of Box Top 22.  It is only a
partial list; the rescue involved hundreds of personnel at many air
bases.  The list of participating aircraft is complete.

Survivors

Robert Thomson, CANEX manager CFB Trenton

Susan Hillier, hair stylist Trenton

Captain Richard Dumoulin, logistics officer Canadian Forces
Communications Command, Ottawa

Captain Wilma de Groot, physician CFB Trenton

Lieutenant Joe Bales, first officer 435 Transport Squadron, CFB Edmonton

Lieutenant Michael Moore, navigator 435 Transport Squadron, CFB Edmonton

Master Warrant Officer Mare Tremblay, supply technician Canadian Forces
Communications Command, Ottawa

Sergeant Paul West, flight engineer 435 Transport Squadron, CFB Edmonton

Master Corporal Tony Cobden, communications researcher 770
Communications Research Squadron, CFB Gander

Master Corporal David Meace, radio technician Canadian Division
Headquarters and Signal Regiment, CI:B Kingston

Master Corporal Mario Ellefsen, communications researcher CFS Leitrim

Master Seaman Douglas Montgomery, communications researcher CFS Leitrim

Private Bill Vance, communications researcher CFS Leitrim

Deceased

Captain John Couch, aircraft commander 435 Transport Squadron, CFB
Edmonton

Captain Judy Tr6panter, logistics officer Canadian Forces Communications
Command, Ottawa

Master Warrant Officer Tom jardine, CANEX regional services manager CFB
Trenton

Warrant Officer Robert Grimsley, supply technician Canadian Forces
Communications Command, Ottawa

Master Corporal Roland Pitre, loadmaster/traffic technician 435
Transport Squadron, CFB Edmonton

Rescuers

405 SQUADRON GREENWOOD

Aircrew

Rescue 104

(Top cover for Rescue 315)

Major William Norman Ricketts

Captain Kevin Eric Anderson

Captain Maurizio Braggio

Captain Nigel George Jackson

Captain Scott Cameron Latter

Captain Patrick Spiteri

Captain Kevin Stuart Thurston

Warrant Officer Joseph Guy Michel Richer-Lafleche

Sergeant Robert Alan Whitwell

408 SQUADRON EDMONTON

Airframe crew

CH-135 Twin Huey (Reassembled helicopter)

Sergeant Terry Sheppard

Private Jim Gilmour

Master Corporal Mary Smith

Master Corporal Dave Perrin

Corporal Tom Ortiz

Corporal Claude Dallaire

Corporal Dave Gunn

413 SQUADRON GREENWOOD

Flight crew

ce-130 Hercules

(Top Cover/SARtech drop)

Major Marvin Macauley

Captain Mare Favre

Captain Randy Price

Sergeant William Sura

Master Corporal Chuck Coutts

Master Corporal James Norris

SARtechs

Warrant Officer Arnold Macauley, M.B.

Sergeant Gerry Dominie

Master Corporal Bruce Best

Master Corporal Alain Houle

Master Corporal Robert Mondeville

Master Corporal jean Tremblay, M.B.

Master Corporal Robert Walker

Corporal Derek Curtis

Corporal Benjamin House

Corporal Eric Larouche

Corporal Mare Lessard

Corporal Keith McKellar

Corporal Ronald O'Reilly

Corporal jean Roy

424 SQUADRON TRENTON

Flight crew

CH-113 Labrador (Trenton-Alert)

Aircraft Commanders:

Captain Pierre Bolduc

Captain Mark Levesque

Captain Don Paul

First Officers:

Captain Steve Parry

Captain Doug Roddick

Lieutenant Chris Brown

Flight Engineers: Sergeant Chuck Mearns Master Corporal Greg Forsyth
Master Corporal Dan L'italien

SARtecbs:

Sergeant John Carriere

Master Corporal Paul Aitcheson

Master Corporal AI Bevan

Corporal Sid Drover

Corporal Brian Weir

Flight crew ce-130 Hercules (Top Cover/SARtech drop)

First rotation:

Major James Burger

Major Daryl McBain

Lieutenant Derek Stobbs

Warrant Officer Wally B61anger

Master Corporal Bob Andrews

Second rotation:

Captain Duane Malone

Captain Eric Volstad

Lieutenant Darwin Ziprick

Master Warrant Officer Frank MacNeil

Master Warrant Officer Geoff Williams

440 SQUADRON EDMONTON

SARtCehs

Warrant Officer Fred Ritchie

Sergeant Ron Burke

Sergeant Tom Elliott

Master Corporal Jim Brown

Master Corporal Yves Carignan

Master Corporal Ron Condly

Master Corporal Tim Eagle

Master Corporal Mike Kobayashi

Corporal Darren Darbyson

Corporal Emilio Dechantal

Corporal Shawn MacDiarmid

Corporal Rick Peck

CFS ALERT

Go-Track Drivers

Master Corporal J.J.  Dewolfe

Master Corporal R.J.  Fixter

Master Corporal D.A.  Getz

Corporal S.L.  Cann

Corporal J.G.S.  Grdgoire